The Body in Theory

The Body in Theory

Essays After Lacan and Foucault
Edited by Becky R. McLaughlin
and Eric Daffron

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
 This book has undergone peer review.

ISBN (print) ­978-​1-4766-​7855-​9

ISBN (ebook) ­978-​1-4766-​4345-​8

Library of Congress and British Library

cataloguing data are available

Library of Congress Control Number 2021032660

© 2021 Becky R. McLaughlin and Benjamin Eric Daffron. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image Maimed and Anonymous,

1987, artist Becky R. McLaughlin

Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii
Introduction: Friendship in a Time of Covid-19
Becky R. McLaughlin and Eric Daffron 1

Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive

Calum Neill and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco 25

The Living and Dead Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze

Lauren Jane Barnett 34

Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs?

Leon S. Brenner 42

The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan:

Resistance and Jouissance
Evi Verbeke 56

Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body

Marina Cano 68

The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art: Géricault,

Dix, and Salomon
Michiko Oki 80

The Ego as Body Image: Lacan’s Mirror Stage Revisited

Dan Collins 92

Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery in the Fiction of Patrick O’Brian

John Halbrooks 105

Ego Portrait: ­Self-Photography as Symptom in Contemporary Technoculture

Chris Vanderwees 115

v
vi   Table of Contents

Social Media, Biopolitical Surveillance, and Disciplinary Social Control:

Aggregating Data to Examine Docile Bodies
Michael Loadenthal 124

From Symptom to Sinthôme: Ridding the “Body of Substance” in My Year

of Rest and Relaxation
Erica D. Galioto 140

Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline: Barney’s Drawing Restraint

and Foucault on Raymond Roussel
Irina Chkhaidze 151

About the Contributors177

Index 179
 Acknowledgments

It has now become a cliché for authors to begin their books by declaring the almost
impossible task of acknowledging all of their intellectual debts. Yet this book has been
so long in the making, as you will soon learn in the introduction, that the task of writing
acknowledgments is truly daunting.
One of the first and most important stepping stones in the making of this collection
was the 2013 London Conference for Critical Thought (LCCT). That conference provided
a stimulating intellectual meeting ground for a diverse array of scholars who delivered
papers for the stream on “Concerning Bodies,” which we organized. Unbeknownst to us
at the time, that stream would later inspire us to edit a collection of essays on the same
topic. We are delighted that Lauren Jane Barnett, Irina Chkhaidze, and Michiko Oki, who
delivered papers on our stream, responded to our call for papers.
When prospective editors issue a call for papers, they never know who will respond
and how they will work with those mostly unknown respondents. We were later heart-
ened and remain grateful that Lauren, Irina, Michiko, and the ten other scholars who
joined them have been a joy to work with. Not only did they submit excellent essays on
a variety of provocative topics, but also they remained responsive and open to our sug-
gestions throughout the process. We are pleased with the final product and hope that our
contributors are as proud of this collection as we are.
Editing a collection is a long, tedious process that takes time and care. During this
process, we benefited from the personal and collegial support of many persons and insti-
tutions. In particular, Becky thanks Executive Editor Arleen Ionescu and ­Editor-in-Chief
Laurent Milesi for allowing her to use, in “Fragmenting the Body: A Lacanian Approach,”
portions of an essay first published as “Gothicizing Apotemnophilia: Live Burial, Secret
Desire, and the Uncanny Body of the Amputee Wannabe” in Word and Text: A Journal
of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 3, no. 2, December 2013, pp. 133–47. In addition,
she thanks her institution, the University of South Alabama, and her ­then-interim chair,
Ellen Harrington, for supporting her request for a sabbatical in the fall of 2019. The Body
in Theory could not have been edited with such care had she not been given the opportu-
nity to be on leave during the editorial process. She also would like to thank the College
of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Alabama for awarding an internal grant to
cover the cost of indexing.
This collection would never have made it to publication without the unflagging sup-
port of Layla Milholen at McFarland. Her timely, encouraging responses at every step of
this ­two-year process made an otherwise challenging endeavor a pleasant and rewarding
one. We also thank our peer reviewers, whose incisive comments helped us and our con-
tributors to polish the final manuscript.

vii
viii  Acknowledgments

Between those two touchstones—the LCCT conference and the publication pro-
cess—and even prior to them, our abiding friendship has sustained this project. You will
soon learn this collection’s backstory, a saga that began some three decades ago, but suf-
fice it to say that this project comes as something of a culmination of a ­three-decade
friendship. We encouraged, prodded, and inspired each other along the way. We learned
from each other and, surprisingly, discovered new things about each other. (We never
would have guessed that we share the same persnickety views on English grammar.)
Thus, it goes without saying that we dedicate this collection to our friendship.
 Introduction
Friendship in a Time of ­COVID-19
Becky R. McLaughlin and Eric Daffron

With the spread of ­COVID-19 and racism ravaging not only our country but also
our world, it is more imperative than ever to celebrate ­long-lasting and ­long-distance
friendships and to search for common ground with those who are, or appear to be, dif-
ferent from us. In the spirit of both celebration and search, we introduce a collection of
essays inspired by the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, two theorists often
thought to be in a hostile and oppositional dance with each other. By assembling this
collection of essays on the body, a topic about which Lacan and Foucault have much to
say, we hope to show that, despite their differences, they occupy common ground, com-
plementing and supplementing each other in valuable ways. First, however, allow us to
introduce ourselves through dialogue, one that reveals the genesis of our friendship while
justifying the unlikely ­co-habitation of Lacan and Foucault on the pages that follow.
In fact, the image on the next page tells the whole story: the story of our friendship,
both personal and theoretical, which is also the backstory of this collection. (Can there
be, incidentally, any friendship—at least of the deep, lasting kind—that is not at once per-
sonal and theoretical? For, as we have learned over the past thirty years, no meaningful
difference exists between the two.) A pivotal episode in our friendship—an episode that
set this collection in motion more than two decades before our LCCT stream on the body
and our later decision to sign a book contract with McFarland—occurred one sultry sum-
mer day in 1996 after we had both received our PhDs from ­SUNY–Buffalo and I was on
the verge of making that ­nerve-wracking transition from graduate school to my first job.
Unexpectedly, Becky requested a visit. Little did I know that she would arrive at my west-
side Buffalo apartment with Maimed and Anonymous, a work of art that she had created
some years before and that I had long admired. A deeply personal, valued gift, a reproduc-
tion of which you now see here, has traveled well. From Buffalo to Columbus, Mississippi,
to Ridgewood, New Jersey, and finally to New York City, the piece has marked my com-
ings and goings while accompanying a ­thirty-year friendship that, despite considerable
distance, refuses to quit. (The fact that the original now hangs over the toilet in my Man-
hattan studio only a Lacanian such as Becky would appreciate.) If we were a little supersti-
tious, we might believe that this artwork knew from the beginning that it was destined for
my hands and, moreover, that it would not only cement our friendship but also steer our
interpersonal and scholarly meanderings, including this very volume.
And perhaps we are a little superstitious, if the word is understood in its original

1
2  Introduction
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   3

­Anglo-Norman and Middle French sense of (a person) following unorthodox religious

beliefs or taking part in unorthodox practices, for when Eric and I met at ­SUNY–Buffalo,
known in those days as a “theory school,” we were both beginning a pilgrimage—Eric
through the landscape of Foucault and I to the shrine of Lacan. Our attraction to these
unorthodox theoretical giants could have made us intellectual antagonists, but something
bound us together, and that something was the body. Although Eric and I may have looked
very much like our peers with the rim structures of eyes, nose, and ears, we were set apart
as soon as we opened our mouths, for we were the only two southerners in the group of
incoming PhD students. Without knowing it, Eric and I had grown up just four hours apart
by car, he on the eastern side of the Big Muddy in Mississippi and I on the western side in
Arkansas. As fellow southerner Carl Elliott writes in his book on ­body-enhancement tech-
nology and identity, specifically in a chapter on ­accent-reduction clinics,
Nobody explicitly teaches us this, but we somehow absorb the lesson that north of the
­Mason-Dixon line a southern accent generally codes for stupidity or simplemindedness. You
can watch only so many movies and television shows featuring ­big-bellied southern sheriffs,
sweaty fundamentalist preachers, and ­shotgun-carrying rednecks before the message sinks in
[5].
In Elliott’s description of three stereotypical southerners, the body looms large: the big
belly of the sheriff, the sweat produced by the pores of the fundamentalist preacher, and
the sunburned neck of the ­gun-toter.
Lumped in with these abject bodies of the South because of the cadences of our
voices, Eric and I identified not only with each other but also with the women who hang
over Eric’s toilet, both of whom wear masks that hide the singularity of their faces and
make one interchangeable with the other. (“If you’ve met one southerner, you’ve met ’em
all!”) Although these women’s bodies appear prepossessing in their slender elegance, they
are “disabled,” lacking hands and, in one case, an arm—hands and arm standing in, here,
for the “standardized American” accent. And although both women’s bodies imply move-
ment to the right, their masked visages face left. In design, implied movement to the left
represents the past and to the right, the future, and thus there is a tension between what
might be called Eric’s and my southern past and our northern future.
We resolved that tension, at least temporarily, when we left the North to take jobs
in the Deep South: Becky at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and I at Missis-
sippi University for Women in, ironically, my hometown of Columbus. Surely T.S. Eliot
got it right when he claimed, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where
we started / And know the place for the first time” (240–42). I was not finished explor-
ing, however. Determined to disrupt my geographic repetition compulsion, I displaced
myself, taking a job at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and, after donning my ­big-city
britches, I eventually moved to New York City. Perhaps it is for this reason that Becky,
who has clung to her southern roots, has retained her unmistakable southern accent and
I have muddled mine. Indeed, some locals detect in my voice a small accent that they
cannot place, other Americans mistake me for Canadian, and the French assume I am
German when I speak French. A colleague of mine put it best when he described my sur-
name—and, I would add, my voice—as “inscrutable.”
Unintentionally, of course, I must have taken my cue from the inscrutable women in

Opposite: Figure 1. Becky R. McLaughlin, Maimed and Anonymous, 1987.

4  Introduction

Maimed and Anonymous, the same artwork that inspired Becky’s earlier remarks on our
temporal and geographic tension. However, my take on Becky’s piece is decidedly differ-
ent, predictably Foucauldian. (No respect for authorial or artistic intention will you find
in this introduction, for we both cut our theoretical teeth on the uncompromising tenets
of French poststructuralism.) What if these women’s masks served as so many forms of
subjectivity available at any given historical juncture? While these masks limit, they do
not exhaust the forms that subjectivity takes, nor do they hide selves that might shimmer
in all their glory if the masks were removed at last. Indeed, these women’s subjectivities
are those very masks. This is the case because subjectivity is, for Foucault, a “form” rather
than a “substance,” a form that is, moreover, not “always identical to itself ” (“Ethics” 290).
In “practices of freedom,” the often incidental, quotidian maneuvers made as we navigate
our world, we accept while we adapt—and always differently—the masks offered us (283).
From that perspective, Becky’s masked women look almost alike. They are thin,
angular, gray figures joined at the hip with similar dress styles and, most importantly, vir-
tually identical masks. And yet, these figures, especially their masks, are not exactly the
same: their subtle variations in posture, for example, and most notably the left figure’s
lips defy any claim of social homogeneity. Moreover, their masks are neither completely
blank nor fully realized. In other words, each woman’s mask, though socially bequeathed,
remains potentially open for experimentation each time that the woman participates in
the masquerade called life. Imagine, for instance, the left figure later adjusting her birth-
mark a little to the right and the right figure eventually adding a pair of lips. This ongoing
creativity, always limited by our social circumstances but never exhausted by them, turns
life into a veritable “work of art” (Foucault, “On the Genealogy” 261).1
Engaged as we are in and with a work of art, my articulation of identification and
Eric’s of difference are necessary companions in a dialectical dance, for identification
without difference smothers, while difference without identification alienates. One of the
insights Lacan allows us to grasp is that “identification” and “difference” are fraught with
problems when employed separately rather than as two halves of a dialectic that makes
it possible to move beyond narcissism to embrace the other. In fact, housed within each
term is a dialectical operation already at work: “identification” suggests the possibility of
difference, for identification is a metaphorical gesture that brings disparate objects into
accord. We begin not by saying this is that but this is not that, and yet, with some effort,
points of comparison can be found, and so even though love is an abstract concept and
a rose a concrete thing, we can compare the two in a metaphorical gesture of identifica-
tion. Likewise, in “difference” we find identification, for when we want to emphasize dif-
ference, we say, “It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” and yet both are round and both
are pieces of fruit. In order to see difference, then, there must be a starting point of same-
ness from which we begin to elaborate how this is not that. Understanding these some-
times (or perhaps all too frequently) divisive terms as part of a dialectic allows us to find
common ground with those who are different from ourselves and to find something dif-
ferent in those we assume to be just like us.2
This is, of course, precisely what Eric and I hope to do by placing two theorists in
close proximity who are often seen as antithetical. We believe that while Lacan and Fou-
cault are certainly different from each other, they have much in common. In fact, the
two sound like old and familiar allies when Foucault argues in the aftermath of Lacan’s
death that, in welcoming the end of traditional thinking regarding the subject, he and
Lacan were committed to finding “a way to free everything that lies hidden behind the
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   5

apparently simple use of the pronoun ‘I’” (“Lacan, the Liberator of Psychoanalysis” 1).
And thus when Eric argues from a Foucauldian standpoint that the women’s masks do
not hide their shimmering selves but are, in fact, their subjectivities, he sounds very
Lacanian indeed. As Slavoj Žižek argues, “A mask is never simply ‘just a mask,’ since it
determines the actual place we occupy in the intersubjective symbolic network. What is
effectively false and null is our ‘inner distance’ towards the mask we wear (the ‘social role’
we play), our ‘true self ’ hidden beneath it” (23). And when Eric states that subjectivity is
for Foucault a form that is never identical to itself, he is stating something akin to Lacan’s
famous axiom regarding the split subject: “The self is an other.” And, finally, when Eric
makes reference to Foucault’s “practices of freedom” through which we accept and adjust
the masks we wear, we can hear traces of Lacan’s concept of freedom. Although Lacan
quipped in a 1972 interview that he never speaks of freedom, he was being disingenuous,
for nearly twenty years earlier he had referred to analysis as “an apprenticeship in free-
dom” (Ego 85). What he means by this seemingly paradoxical statement is that the kind of
engagement involved in psychoanalysis entails constantly returning to and reformulating
the past in order to keep the future open—and thus free.
If the masks we wear are limited to the ones available at any given moment, Lacan
would argue, like Foucault, that just because we put on a mask does not mean that we are
fixed, exhausted, or finally determined by it, for although he argues that the “game is already
played, the die already cast,” he also argues that “we can pick [the die] up again, and throw
it anew” (Ego 219). And, further, like the experimentation advocated by Foucault through
which we modify, create, and invent, and thus accept and adjust the masks we wear, Lacan’s
concept of the sinthôme allows for the possibility of creating new signifiers for ourselves
instead of remaining captive to the ones that have been created for us. Indeed, according
to Lacan, “the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke” (Écrits 86), to
bring the truth into existence “as something new, as a revelation that evokes transforma-
tional encounters” (­Nishat-Botero 20). This is a “practice of freedom,” Lacanian style.
From the perspective of identification and difference conjoined, we can see in the
masked women a rough adumbration of Lacan and Foucault: two theorists joined at the
hip through national identity and, at least in some guises, poststructuralism but whose
subtle variations in mask and posture mark them as singular. To illustrate this singular-
ity, we offer the following introductory essays on the body in theory. Each essay—Becky’s
on apotemnophilia and Eric’s on masturbation—is designed to give readers just a fore-
taste of what these theorists can teach us about the body, a topic that has recently inspired
more intense scrutiny as we live through the coronavirus pandemic. Although these
essays maintain theoretical distance, just as we maintain social distance, they, like those
of us in lockdown or quarantine, are not as isolated as they might at first seem. Indeed, as
you will soon see, they return in complementary fashion to the themes of disability, body
parts, and subjectivity that have so far preoccupied this introduction.

Fragmenting the Body: A Lacanian Approach3

Becky R. McLaughlin
It is certain that the spirit becomes crippled in a misshapen body.
—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
6  Introduction

The body resembles a sentence that seems to invite us to dismantle it into

its component letters, so that its true meanings may be revealed ever anew
through an endless stream of anagrams.
—Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on
all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not
grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

It was Mark Twain who introduced us to the English folktale of the woman with
the golden arm whose husband digs up her body after burial, severs the arm, and is sub-
sequently haunted by the ghost of his wife demanding her arm back. This tale of “The
Golden Arm” is hardly meant to be a philosophical treatise on the teleology of the human
body, and yet it nevertheless relies on a belief in and/or concern for the integrity of the
body even beyond death. While Twain’s purpose is to give a young girl in the audience a
fright, the tale’s content is not particularly frightening. What if, however, Twain had told
a folktale in which the opposite happens, in which a woman haunts her husband with the
demand that he sever her arm and take it away? The effect of this tale would be quite dif-
ferent from that of “The Golden Arm.”
We can begin to understand how Lacan conceives of the human body by steering
clear of the Scylla of biological essentialism and the Charybdis of social construction4
and, perhaps more daringly, by narrating the opposite of Twain’s tale, a tale that, for our
purposes, begins when Carl Elliott published in the year 2000 an article engaging with the
phenomenon of “apotemnophilia,” i.e., the desire to have a healthy body part removed.5
Elliott’s article argues that these “apotemnophiles,” the label Johns Hopkins psycholo-
gist John Money assigned them in 1977, cannot see themselves as “whole” with the stan-
dard set of limbs, and they believe with unshakeable certainty that their ­self-images and
thus their lives would be improved if they could have a foot removed, both legs replaced
with stumps, or an arm lopped off at the elbow as depicted in the image of the masked
women, Maimed and Anonymous. Striking examples of these “amputee wannabes” are a
­seventy-nine-year-old man from New York who died of gangrene after having traveled to
Tijuana to get a ­black-market leg amputation that cost him $10,000; a man from Milwau-
kee who cut off his arm with a homemade guillotine and informed surgeons he would cut
it off again if they ­re-attached it; and a woman from California who tied off her legs with
tourniquets and packed them in ice, hoping to necessitate amputation. Thus, it seems
that for these apotemnophiles, the “whole” body is the misshapen body of which Victor
Hugo speaks in The Hunchback of ­Notre-Dame, for their spirits are crippled by having to
inhabit bodies completely out of alignment with the image they see of themselves in what
might be called their psyche’s eye.
Before Elliott’s article appeared, a fairly sizeable group of apotemnophiles had been
quietly and painfully living a waking nightmare: buried alive in an uncanny body simul-
taneously familiar and strange, suffocated by a claustrophobic flesh crowded with one
or perhaps two limbs too many, and obsessed with a secret desire to become an ampu-
tee. Like a character in a Gothic novel, the apotemnophile has been and continues to be
tortured by unanswered or inadequately posed questions concerning identity and sexu-
ality—questions lying at the core of human subjectivity and of the Gothic narrative with
its troubled bodies and haunted spaces. If the monster in Gothic fiction “marks a pecu-
liarly modern emphasis upon the horror of particular kinds of bodies” (Halberstam 3),
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   7

then it could be argued that the apotemnophile’s desire for amputation, with the potential
to incite anxiety as well as horror, is the “monstrous” double of the normative subject’s
desire for unity and totality.
But if the apotemnophile is considered a monster, so too must be the normative
subject. From a Lacanian standpoint, we might say, “Monsters are us.” For just as the
Gothic revolves around confrontations with the dismembered body and thus can be seen
as “a history of invasion and resistance, of the enemy within, of bodies torn and tor-
tured, or else rendered miraculously, or sometimes catastrophically, whole” (Punter 4),
the psychoanalytic body is, as Lacan argues in “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” plagued
by “images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devour-
ing, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos” that Lacan “grouped together under
the apparently structural term of imagos of the fragmented body” (Écrits 11). This frag-
mented body is the one inhabited by the child—born prematurely, as Lacan asserts, and
thus utterly dependent upon its caretakers—until the mirror stage creates a sense of unity
through a glimpse of the specular image. However, the specular image as unifying force
is a mere mirage, and the child is destined to become an adult forever out of harmony
with itself, inhabited by frightening memories of the body’s originary disarray, on the one
hand, and by the defensive but rigid armor of the ego, on the other, itself capable of doing
violence to the body and of “scatter[ing] again [its] disjecta membra”:
The child, itself so recently born, gives birth to a monster: a statue, an automaton, a fabricated
thing. […] From spare parts, an armoured mechanical creature is being produced within the
human subject, and developing unwholesome habits and destructive appetites of its own. The
­self-division of the subject, first revealed to Freud by dreams, is here being ­re-imagined by
Lacan as nightmare [Bowie 26].
Unlike the normative subject for whom fragmentation is a catastrophe that must be
defended against and for whom the truth of ­self-division must be abjured, the apotem-
nophile craves fragmentation, actively seeking to resist the body’s standard assembly or
organization and thereby acknowledging the self as other or split.
Sounding like an apotemnophile par excellence, Lacanian analyst Eugenie
­L emoine-Luccioni states that “there is a bad exchange in human relations because
one never is what one has … [sic] I have the skin of an angel, but I am a jackal … [sic]
the skin of a woman, but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no
exception to the rule because I am never what I have” (qtd. in Orlan 88). Inspired by
­Lemoine-Luccioni, the famous carnal artist Orlan has come to believe that, through sur-
gery, it is possible to have one’s external image match one’s internal. The same is true
of the apotemnophile. In contrast to Dr. Jekyll, who sees his transformation into Mr.
Hyde as shaking “the very fortress of identity” (81), the apotemnophile views the surgi-
cal transformation of the body brought about by amputation as a consolidation of iden-
tity. And, thus, the apotemnophile finds a counter narrative to Stevenson’s in Katherine
Dunn’s 1983 novel Geek Love, which tells the story of Arty Binewski, a carnival boy born
with flippers instead of arms and legs. In Dunn’s novel, Arty becomes the cult leader of
a group of ­so-called “norms” who are willing to pay to have fingers, toes, arms, and legs
surgically removed by a surgeon named Dr. Phyllis. For these norms, amputation is not a
loss but a form of liberation.
In the story of apotemnophilia, there is, therefore, a surplus of uncanny effects: not
only is the apotemnophile’s body both heimlich and unheimlich for the apotemnophile, but
it is equally so for the normative subject, for while the apotemnophile’s body very closely
8  Introduction

resembles the ­non-apotemnophile’s body, the desire for amputation lies beyond episte-
mological apprehension for the normative subject. What generates the anxiety an apo-
temnophile creates in a ­non-apotemnophile is the encounter with a “human Other who
is paradoxically similar (sharing the markers of the normative) but different” (Anolik 4),
marked as it were by a radical difference in desire. More importantly, however, the apo-
temnophile’s unusual desire undermines the traditional biological understanding of the
body, replacing it with a body understood as a representation of psychical fantasy, or what
Lacan refers to as imaginary anatomy. In this respect, the apotemnophile’s understanding
of the body is much more in accord with Lacan’s than is the normative subject’s. Accord-
ing to Lacan, we are not born as a body but merely as a living organism, and thus we come
to have a body (as an attribute) only through and/or in language. In fact, Lacan views the
phrase “speaking being” as a redundancy “because there is only being due to speaking;
were it not for the verb ‘to be,’ there would be no being at all” (qtd. in Fink, Lacanian Sub-
ject 182). Like Freud, who argues that the hysteric behaves as if anatomy does not exist,
Lacan calls upon us in Television to “[w]itness the hysteric” (6) in order to demonstrate
that language not only carves out or defines the body but also carves up or divides it.6 The
paralyzed limb or the facial tic of the hysteric, which has no organic cause, bears witness to
the fact that our experience of the body is not organized by real objects and relations but
by a fictional or fantasmatic construction of the body that has little or nothing to do with
its neurological or biological structure. It would seem, then, that one of the central themes
of apotemnophilia is the fictional or fantasmatic underpinnings of body image. That is, a
body with two arms is as much a fictional construction as a body with one.
The “amping” of the body by apotemnophiles is not simply an amputation, how-
ever, but an amplification, a means of giving voice to the pain of living inside a misbegot-
ten body. In amping the body, apotemnophiles are attempting to author(ize) their own
bodies, to revise them where necessary, just as a writer crosses out an extraneous word
or phrase. The body of apotemnophiles is a Barthesian textual body, the writerly text
as site of production rather than consumption, for apotemnophiles “manhandle” their
own bodily tutor texts, breaking and interrupting their “natural” divisions and thereby
undercutting, as it were, the notion of totality. Like Barthes’s deconstruction of Balzac’s
“Sarrasine,” the apotemnophile recognizes and embraces lack rather than hiding it with
the neurotic’s fantasy of wholeness. As Lacan remarks in “Function and Field of Speech
and Language,” he “object[s] to any reference to totality in the individual, since it is the
subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is
his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other
to be no more than mirages” (Écrits 80). In “Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of
Desire,” Lacan shores up his objection to the fantasy of totality by arguing that “the neu-
rotic has been subjected to imaginary castration from the beginning; it is castration that
sustains this strong ego,” and yet “it is beneath this ego, which certain analysts choose to
strengthen still more, that the neurotic hides the castration that he denies” (Écrits 323).
Drawing on Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, with its concept of the corps morcelé
and its aversion to enforcing the normative, it could be argued that the apotemnophile is
a perverse postmodern Prometheus. That is to say, apotemnophiles stage their own cas-
tration in an attempt to prop up a God (i.e., the Father function as law- and ­space-maker)
who is only partially operant, but in so doing they steal God’s thunder as creator of the
human body. Instead of allowing the body’s “natural” contours to define identity, the apo-
temnophile in the guise of a perverse postmodern Prometheus allows an “internal” vision
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   9

of identity to define the body. What is striking, here, is that for the apotemnophile, “the
true self is the one produced by medical science” (Elliott 74). The story of the apotemno-
phile, then, is a story of same and other collapsing into one, for the apotemnophile is at
once Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, heroic subject and abject
other. Can we not say that the story of the apotemnophile is a Gothic story that does what
the Gothic does best? With its subversion of conceptual boundaries and categories, its
fracturing of the barriers erected by church and state, it “interrogates the central cate-
gory of thought identified by Foucault, the category of ‘man,’ the Enlightenment category
that is narrowly defined as orderly, rational, healthy, white, and male” (Anolik 2). Shat-
tering the illusion of perfect wholeness, which is the normative subject’s defense against
the reality of the ­not-so-perfect-or-whole-body, the story of apotemnophilia reveals the
impossibility of the perfectly able body and the falsity of the undivided one.

***
Although apotemnophilia was not included as a pathology in the latest version of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it has been included in the
International Classification of Diseases (­ICD-11) as “Body integrity dysphoria,” or BID,
under code 6C21.7 Questions concerning diagnosis and treatment continue to be fraught
with difficulty, however, as the ownership of the body and the ­medico-ethical limits of
­self-modification are interrogated, challenged, and debated. (In the debates surround-
ing voluntary amputation, for example, questions have been raised regarding the medical
or ethical perils for both patient and physician of seeking to have a body part removed.)
According to Elizabeth Loeb, who has written about bodily integrity and identity disor-
ders as understood by United States law, the courts take the body for granted as a “static
or reified set of closed boundaries” rather than “as a contested and shifting landscape
within physical and psychic experience” (45), and thus legal and cultural permission for
body modification “holds steady only so long as [one’s] choices map onto the landscape
of normative and [normalizing] physical [conceptions] of race, sex, and gender” (47).
During the last decade of the twentieth century, the body loomed large as an object of
study. Given this, it is not surprising that the apotemnophile would have come out of the
closet in the year 2000 with the publication of Elliott’s startling article.
What is surprising is that two decades later the courts remain somewhat intransi-
gent in their essentialist understanding of the human body. What is also surprising is the
fact that few if any have attempted to understand BID from a psychoanalytic perspective,
but, as Bruce Fink points out, while modern psychiatry is good at giving a new name to a
different behavior, it is not so good at expanding our understanding of it. And thus it may
prove useful to address some of the questions Elliott raises in his article and the book
that followed: is the desire to have a limb amputated any more pathological than a desire
to have ­breast-augmentation surgery? The quick answer is no; it is simply explained by a
different structural phenomenon, one being a perverse or primary desire and the other a
neurotic or secondary one. Is the label “apotemnophilia” a misnomer? In other words, is
the central issue one of sexual desire, as the suffix “philia” suggests, or one of body image?
The answer is yes, which is to say that the question takes the wrong form. It is not an
either/or but a both/and proposition. The most pressing question, however, is that raised
by Joan Copjec in a special issue of Umbr(a) devoted to the drive: “What’s the matter with
bodies? Why do they seem to suppurate […] so much trouble for themselves?” (12). The
quick answer is because we speak. Because we are speaking beings, our bodies generate
10  Introduction

trouble. Although apotemnophiles offer a variety of reasons for desiring amputation—for

example, to gain sympathy from others, to cope heroically, or to find new ways of doing
old tasks—psychoanalysis can offer a structural explanation for their desire, and it is this
structural explanation that I wish to articulate.
When we think of the fetish from a Freudian standpoint, we think of an object such
as a ­high-heeled shoe or a piece of woman’s lingerie, which stands in for the missing
maternal penis and allows us to defend against the threat of castration. “To put it plainly,”
states Freud, “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little
boy once believed in and does not wish to forego […]” (215). More broadly, literary and
cultural criticism of a Lacanian bent has explored how Freud’s ideas of fetishism draw
attention to the way existent things come to stand in for ­non-existent things to veil an
intolerable lack. With the apotemnophile, however, the fetish operates rather differently.
Here, the function of the fetish appears to be inverted. The fetish of the apotemnophile
allows what I would call the “claustrophobic body” to defend against too much presence
by fetishizing lack itself. Instead of functioning as a defense against the threat of castra-
tion, the amputee wannabe’s fetish functions as a defense against the threat of too much
jouissance. The desire to have a limb amputated is a resistance to live burial, an attempt
to eliminate the suffocating presence of the mOther,8 its alien presence too big to be com-
fortably borne by the apotemnophile.
In his ­re-reading of Freud’s work, Lacan maintains that while belief in the ­so-called
maternal penis is not irrelevant to understanding the fetishist, what is more central in
the mechanism of disavowal is “the father’s desire, the father’s name, and the father’s law”
(Fink, A Clinical Introduction 170). “To return to phantasy,” says Lacan in “The Subver-
sion of the Subject,” “let us say that the pervert imagines himself to be the Other in order
to ensure his jouissance, and that it is what the neurotic reveals when he imagines himself
to be a pervert—in his case, to assure himself of the existence of the Other” (Écrits 322).
Fink paraphrases this pertinently:
[T]he apparent contradiction inherent in disavowal can […] be described as follows: “I know
full well that my father hasn’t forced me to give up my mother and the jouissance I take in her
presence (real and/or imagined in fantasy), hasn’t exacted the ‘pound of flesh,’ but I’m going to
stage such an exaction or forcing with someone who stands in for him; I’ll make that person
pronounce the law” [170].
While the father’s law, or the “No,” is fully operant in neurosis and ­non-operant in psy-
chosis, the father’s law, or the “No,” is only partially operant in perversion, and thus the
child undergoes alienation (i.e., primal repression or the division that creates a split
between the conscious and the unconscious) but not separation. The father, whose role it
is to separate the child from its mother, fails to do so and, further, fails to name the moth-
er’s desire, which means that the child will be treated to her ­anxiety-provoking demand.
As a defense against this demand, the child assumes the role of the imaginary (that is,
unstated or unknown) object of the mOther’s desire, occupying the position of lack itself.
There is, thus, a useful link to be drawn between Lacan’s scenario and the uncanny feeling
of incompleteness that apotemnophiles report ­vis-à-vis their unamputated bodies. “I will
never feel truly whole with legs,” says one woman in her early forties. “My body image
has always been as a woman who has lost both her legs,” says another (Elliott 213). Until
the mOther’s desire is named, “there is no lack; the child is submerged in the mOther
as demand and cannot adopt a stance of his own […]. The child here is confronted with
what we can refer to as a lack of lack” (Fink, A Clinical Introduction 177), which means
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   11

that, for the perverse subject, the pound of flesh has not been exacted, castration has
never been completed—hence the perverse subject’s need to stage or reenact castration
understood, here, as the registration of a lack that allows space for the subject’s emer-
gence, development, and growth.
We can argue, then, that the apotemnophile’s desire for amputation is a desire for
the castrating gesture that has never quite come. Or, to put it in slightly different terms,
we can argue that it is a desire for the dialectical comings and goings of the fort/da game,
of which only one term has been properly articulated. Perhaps amputating a limb and
thus making it go “away” is a means of getting the fort to operate. In the hands of the
apotemnophile, little Ernst’s cotton reel, which stands in for a mOther who comes and
goes, represents the part of the self that has been colonized by a mOther who comes but
never goes, a part of the self that the apotemnophile wishes to toss away in order to cre-
ate breathing space in a claustrophobic psychic scenario. When their fathers fail as rep-
resentatives of the phallus (i.e., the law- and thus ­space-maker), apotemnophiles become
their own law- or ­space-makers. Apotemnophiles gesture toward this failure by draw-
ing attention to it in a violent and hyperbolic enactment of castration. For example, it
is not unusual for apotemnophiles rejected for surgery to place themselves on the rail-
road tracks or to make use of a ­log-splitter as a means of bringing about the desired lack.
Clearly, the need for lack, and thus for amputation, can be so imperative that apotemno-
philes are willing to go to dramatic and physically traumatizing lengths to achieve it. The
desire for amputation, therefore, is not a desire for pain but for absence.
According to Elliott, “Most wannabes trace their desire to become amputees back
to before the age of six or seven, and some will say that they cannot remember a time
when they didn’t have the desire,” many recounting early childhood and “­life-changing”
experiences with amputees (213). Like the failure of the castrating gesture, what Elliott’s
comments suggest is that the normative subject’s mirror stage operates differently for apo-
temnophiles. As Lacan theorizes in his discussion of the mirror stage, when the toddler
first encounters its mirror image, it is still uncoordinated, unsteady on its feet, and in need
of support by either a parent or a walker. Although the parent generally assures the toddler
that the mirror image is its own, there nevertheless remains an incongruity between the
toddler’s lived experience of its body and the ­well-put-together image it sees in the mir-
ror. I would speculate—and, of course, one could speculate otherwise—that this moment
of recognition does not occur for the apotemnophile as the parent fails to register the tod-
dler’s identification with its mirror image, and so the apotemnophile continues to expe-
rience its body as fragmented, never fully identifying with its “superior” mirror image.
Having a perverse structure already in place and a body experienced as fragmented makes
it possible for the apotemnophile to cathect to the image of an amputee, and thus the pro-
foundly important moment of mirroring, which allows for social development, occurs not
with one’s mirror image but with the body of the amputated other.
For some, it might seem troubling to place the apotemnophile in the clinical and
structural category of perversion, but from a Lacanian standpoint, there is no moral
judgment attached to this designation. In fact, one of Freud’s most ­far-reaching claims,
introduced in Three Essays on Sexuality, was that perversion in its sexological sense is pri-
mary while what we call “normal” sexuality is secondary. Although perversion is gener-
ally understood to be a deviation from the natural or instinctual, “normal” sexuality is
the true deviation since it entails learned practices that take shape only after the erotic
field of what Freud called the “polymorphously perverse” body has been segregated into
12  Introduction

erogenous zones. Jonathan Dollimore nicely articulates Freud’s theory of sexuality and
civilization in the following statement:
[I]t is sexual perversion, not sexual “normality,” which is the given in human nature. Indeed,
sexual normality is precariously achieved and precariously maintained: the process whereby
the perversions are sublimated can never be guaranteed to work; it has to be reenacted in the
case of each individual subject and is an arduous and conflictual process […]. Sometimes it
doesn’t work; sometimes it appears to, only to fail at a later date [1].
“Freud,” Dollimore notes, “attributes to the perversions an extraordinary disruptive power,”
for in their “‘multiplicity and strangeness’ (1.346), the perversions constitute a threatening
excess of difference originating from within the same” (12). Via Freud, states Dollimore,
we can see that “what a culture designates as alien, utterly other and different, is never so.
That culture exists in a relationship of difference with the alien, which is also a relationship
of fundamental, antagonistic interdependence” (12). It is almost as if Dollimore is referring
specifically to the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and thus to the normative
subject and the apotemnophile, when he argues that what is most disturbing about perver-
sion is its place of origin: “it originates internally to just those things it threatens” (4).
Perhaps what causes normative subjects to view the apotemnophile with such horror
is their unconscious knowledge that the apotemnophile is actually more same than other.
For the fantasy of the whole body is just that: a fantasy that masks the reality of the body’s
brokenness and fragmentation. Of necessity, it would seem, bodies generate trouble for
themselves because of the abiding gap between the imaginary and the real, between fan-
tasy and reality—a gap the apotemnophile recognizes and wishes to acknowledge but that
the normative subject wishes to repress.
In David Punter’s comments on the direction of the Gothic, he, like Freud, attributes
a tremendous amount of subversive power to the perversions, for according to Punter,
it is not that the structures of perversion (or “distortions” as he refers to them) are “per-
ceived as a root of fracture and disablement” but that they offer possible recourse
against the real enemy, which is precisely the “perversion” of constricting, normative,
­male-dominated heterosexuality. Cruelties and obsession in the Gothic are certainly real […];
but there is a further sense in which at least these fluctuations, twistings, squirmings of the
body provide some evidence of resistance, the legacy perhaps of the old myth of de Sade’s influ-
ence on the Gothic […] [216].
If we accept Punter’s comments, perhaps it will become possible to view apotemnophilia
not as cause for horror but as a possible response to normative notions regarding the
“proper” contours of the human body. In saying this, I am not advertising apotemno-
philia as a strategy to take up against normative life but calling attention to the role it
plays as part of our cultural text. It is a symptom, and thus a signifier, of the necessity of
the cut (i.e., of absence, castration, the fort in the fort/da game) in the formation of iden-
tity, and thus of body, for both normative subject and apotemnophile.

Manhandling the Body: A Foucauldian Approach

Eric Daffron
One can be sure that [masturbation] is at least the only pleasure that really
harms nobody.
—Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins”
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   13

Almost no one knows what everyone does.

—Michel Foucault, Abnormal
What we must work on […] is not so much to liberate our desires but to
make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure [plaisirs].
—Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life”

Towards the end of Salvation Army, an autofictional novel by Francophone Moroc-

can writer Abdellah Taïa, Abdellah, recently relocated from Morocco to Switzerland,
recounts being lured by a ­forty-something-year-old man into the men’s public urinals.
There Abdellah encounters an “intense poetic sexuality” (121):
A dozen men of all ages were lined up in front of the urinals and were lovingly looking at cock.
That really struck me.
It wasn’t like I was shocked but more like I had just caught up with a bunch of my old friends.
These men expressed their desire without becoming violent, touched the penis in a very gen-
tle, courteous way. Inside this dirty, underground location, they played out a sexuality that was
both clandestine and public. […] They didn’t talk. Instead they let their lucky bodies do the
talking for them. They would masturbate with their right hand while touching their partners
[sic] buttocks with the left. These men were not paired up. They all made love together, stand-
ing up [121–22].

This scene of male mutual masturbation is striking for reasons beyond its defiance of sex-
ual norms: first, for its ecstatic, even lyrical qualities; second, for its paradoxically fur-
tive and public location; third, for the participants’ respectful gentility; and, finally, for
their body language. The scene is designed as a mere backdrop for the sexual encounter
between Abdellah and the older man. However, if we moved the scene to the foreground,
it might inspire us to approach the body from a perspective that, while Foucauldian,
actually transcends Foucault’s two most popular—and overworked—bodies: the “docile
body” from Discipline and Punish and the sexualized body from the introductory volume
of The History of Sexuality.
Clearly, both of those bodies figure prominently in Foucault’s histories of biopower,
a quintessentially modern configuration of knowledge and power that, since the sev-
enteenth century, has disciplined bodies and regulated populations (History 139–40).
Despite the importance of those accounts of bodies and of biopower more generally, lim-
iting our attention to knowledge and power—and dominant instances at that—prevents
us from grasping Foucault’s more comprehensive view of the body. Towards the end of
his life—most notably in the first lecture of the course on The Government of Self and
Others and in the opening pages of The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History
of Sexuality—Foucault offers a theoretical framework for just such a capacious perspec-
tive. In the latter text, he uses the word “experience” to refer to the “interrelations of […]
three axes”: “fields of knowledge,” “systems of power,” and, perhaps most importantly,
“forms of subjectivity” (4).9 This section of the introduction attends to those three axes of
“experience” while outlining one Foucauldian approach to the body.
Take, as an example of a modern Western body, the male masturbator. In two
major texts—the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality and, more exten-
sively, a series of lectures entitled Abnormal—Foucault recounts the eighteenth- and
­nineteenth-century “campaign” and “crusade” against the sexuality of the ­middle-class
child and adolescent (History 42; Abnormal 235–37). Labeling this precocious activity a
“nonrelational sexuality,” this period’s ­anti-masturbation movement focused knowledge
14  Introduction

and power on “the relation between hand and body” (Abnormal 264–66). The essence of
the knowledge that emerged during the period—and “continues, in a modified form no
doubt, down to the present”—is captured in a series of noteworthy phrases in Foucault’s
two accounts: “discursive orthopedics,” “inexhaustible and corrective discourses,” and,
most stunningly, “the immense jabbering about masturbation” (History 29, 42; Abnor-
mal 233). ­Anti-masturbation discourses, typically manuals advising and warning both
parents and young persons, usually emptied the forbidden practice of all pleasure and,
instead, treated it as “a sort of polymorphous, absolute illness without remission,” one
that indeed served as “the possible cause of every possible kind of illness” (Abnormal
234–35, 237, 239). Summarizing a graphic description of the masturbator in a period
text, Foucault lists this troubled body’s most salient ailments: “exhaustion, loss of sub-
stance, an inert, diaphanous, and dull body, a constant discharge, a disgusting oozing
from within the body, the infection of those around him and the consequent impossibil-
ity of their approaching him” (238).
The knowledge surrounding the masturbating youth worked in tandem with power’s
“indefinite lines of penetration” (History 42). One “line of penetration” emanated from the
masturbating child’s parents. In a remarkable passage, Foucault describes parents’ task of
surveilling their children: “Parents must watch over their children, spy on them, creep up
on them, peer beneath their blankets, and sleep beside them” (Abnormal 250). However,
parents constituted only one source of power. In fact, according to Foucault, their power
merely extended that of doctors, who advised not only parents but also schools, which, in
turn, worked alongside parents to curb masturbation both at home and at school (Abnor-
mal 249–54; History 28, 42). Together, these forces of power enclosed the masturbat-
ing child in a veritable “microcell” (Abnormal 59)—one from which the child was, by
all accounts, never released. Indeed, in a twist to this saga too complex to recount here,
­mid-nineteenth-century psychiatry eventually included the activities of “the little mas-
turbators” in a whole spectrum of “abnormal aberrations” of the newly discovered “sex-
ual instinct,” deviations potentially responsible for “mental illness” (277–82).
While Foucault’s account of this early ­anti-masturbation movement fruitfully illu-
minates the paired axes of knowledge and power, what is largely missing from those two
mid–1970s texts is the third axis: the subjectivity of the masturbator. However, by at least
the 1980s, in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality and in a series of courses on
the ancient Greeks and Romans and the early Christians, Foucault explores this axis in
depth. In The Use of Pleasure, he examines “‘prescriptive’ texts,” ones that “problematized”
certain ancient Greek “practices” and offered “rules” and “advice” “to be read, learned,
reflected upon, and tested out” for “everyday conduct” (11–13). Although these classi-
cal texts are a far cry from eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century ­anti-masturbatory dis-
courses, Foucault’s method for analyzing the former provides the theoretical terms for
understanding how a hypothetical masturbator from the nineteenth century—or, to leap
to the present, from our own century—might subjectivize normalizing discourses of
masturbation and intersecting lines of power.
In fact, Foucault identifies four facets of subjectivation. The first concerns “the
determination of the ethical substance” (26): the part of the self on which to work. Our
hypothetical ­twenty-first-century male masturbator might regulate his hands and his
erections, for example, or, instead, his sexual fantasies. The second deals with “the mode
of subjection” (27): one’s relationship to the rule of conduct. One could forego mastur-
bation as a Lenten discipline (as part of one’s identity as a Christian) or in preparation
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   15

for an arduous game (as part of one’s membership on an athletic team). The third entails
“forms of elaboration, of ethical work” (27): the practices whereby one complies with a
prescription and, in the process, transforms oneself. The masturbator might keep a log of
lapses, for instance, or avoid titillating Internet images. The fourth involves “the telos of
the ethical subject” (27): the goal not only of moral practice but also of oneself as a moral
being. One might curtail masturbation in aspiring to greater Christian purity or ever-
more rigid ­self-discipline.
The previous discussion elucidates a normative example, but clearly not all bod-
ies—certainly not all masturbators—strive to live up to social norms. Indeed, knowl-
edge and power do not always render bodies “docile,” and masturbators do not always
take ­anti-masturbation advice to heart. Although Foucault does not provide an extended
example of a recalcitrant masturbator, he offers the theoretical basis for just such an
investigation into this alternative “experience.” At the very end of the introductory vol-
ume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault admonishes us not to ask for more sex or to
liberate our sex, for to do so leaves us trapped in circuits of knowledge and power that
summon, identify, and at times regulate our sexuality. Instead, he inspires us “to counter
the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges” (157). He is
more specific in “Body/Power.” In that interview, Foucault explains how power directed
at the body can incite “a ­counter-attack in that same body” (56). For instance, in the wake
of the early ­anti-masturbation movement, the “corporal persecution” of the child mastur-
bator actually created “an intensification of […] desire, for, in and over his body” (56–57).
Taking those comments as its cue, the remainder of this section explores masturbatory
acts that undermine social order. The example is New York Jacks, a ­Manhattan-based sex
club that invites ­like-minded men to attend its group sex parties, at which masturbation
is not only condoned but, with minor exceptions, exclusively permitted.10
New York Jacks and other sex clubs are arguably heterotopias. In “Different Spaces,”
Foucault defines heterotopias as spaces “outside all places, although they are actually
localizable,” as spaces that “represent,” “contest,” and “reverse” all other places (178).
Meeting that definition, sex clubs afford occasions for contesting and reversing social
mores: for “scandalizing” conventional morality, “travesty[ing]” cultural norms, and, of
course, “showing off ” with others, to invoke Foucault’s sexualized verbs for resistance
in the introduction to The History of Sexuality (45). As the club’s website confirms, New
York Jacks’ parties celebrate bodies and community in a “liberating” “fantasy world,” for
some even a “heaven,” “where social norms are abandoned” but, as in Taïa’s sex scene, “a
feeling of mutual respect” is observed. Sex clubs are also paradoxically both inside and
outside: locatable on a city map, these spaces radically differ from more conventional
sites and, as such, occupy the position of the outside in relation to those very sites. Thus,
like Taïa’s makeshift “sex club” in the Genevan public urinals, New York Jacks is both
“clandestine” and “public”—or “­semi-public,” as the latter’s website calls it.
New York Jacks meets additional characteristics of heterotopias. First, it ruptures
time as we usually experience it. Like Foucault’s example of festivals, a public sex party
takes place on the periphery of the cityscape, where “time in its most futile, most transi-
tory and precarious aspect” unfolds (182). In other words, a sex party offers an opportu-
nity to experience our “time and life,” as Foucault puts it in The Punitive Society: a “time
and life,” not of work, but of “pleasure, discontinuity, festivity, […] moments, chance,”
and other instances of “explosive energy” (232). Second, a public sex party is simultane-
ously open and closed, theoretically accessible to all, as Foucault writes of heterotopias,
16  Introduction

but only in so far as they follow rules or other constraints (183). Although New York Jacks’
participants must be consenting adults (and presumably men), as the website informs
readers, the club does not otherwise restrict participation based on age, race, sexual ori-
entation, body type, or other features. In addition, participants must pay the price of
admission, strip virtually naked (at least to their underwear but preferably to their shoes
and socks), and restrict activity to masturbation. (A little nipple tweaking or sucking is
allowed—but no anal or oral sex.) Finally, like a brothel, another one of Foucault’s exam-
ples, a public sex party forges “a space of illusion that denounces all real space […] within
which human life is portioned off, as being even more illusory” (184). In other words, a
sex club opposes as less than real spaces that empty existence of ecstatic pleasure, inter-
personal connection, and chance encounters.
Beyond Foucault’s basic characteristics of a heterotopia, New York Jacks con-
tests normative spaces in other ways. For one, the club disseminates knowledges whose
“claims,” to borrow Foucault’s words quoted above, “counter the grips of power.” Fou-
cault calls this iteration of the first axis “subjugated knowledges.” In “Society Must Be
Defended,” a series of lectures that he delivered starting the same year as the publication
of Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains that “subjugated knowledges” include ones
that “have been disqualified as nonconceptual” and “as insufficiently elaborated”; they lie
“below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (7). These knowledges are, in short,
“what people know at a local level” (8).
New York Jacks’ website serves as just such an “insurrection of subjugated knowl-
edges” (7). The website informs readers of what they presumably already know: mas-
turbation is a “satisfying,” “universal activity” that some men enjoy practicing in
“communal” settings. In fact, given that some participants are married, heterosexual
men, as the website suggests, the club fosters an environment in which men, regardless
of sexual orientation, can enjoy this pleasure with one another. In addition, the website
maintains that masturbators know two “arts.” First, the club’s founders and presumably
current participants know “the art of jacking off.” Second, men apparently possess “a sub-
tle art of knowing when someone is interested in playing.” Offering advice to novices, the
website recommends that attendees “[s]tart by walking up to a guy and making eye con-
tact or standing next to them.” “You’ll know,” the website assures potential attendees, “if
they want to pla[y].”
Participants’ presumed knowingness—their ability to read and respect body lan-
guage—equips them with the ability to monitor both themselves and others as part of
New York Jacks’ larger strategy to keep parties from getting out of hand. That is, the
knowledge that the website assumes and promotes intersects with two sets of guide-
lines and rules that constitute Foucault’s second axis. Although New York Jacks takes
for granted that most attendees know and will follow social and sexual cues, the website
admits that “often one or two guys […] can’t read the signals and can be overly aggres-
sive.” In that case, the website recommends saying “no” or moving the aggressor’s hand
and, either way, walking away. In addition to recommending these guidelines, New York
Jacks sets rules. As the website firmly asserts, “‘[N]o insertion of anyone’s anything into
anywhere, no ass play, no sucking, no fucking.’” To enforce this policy, the club relies not
only on participants’ “­self-policing” but also on employed “monitors,” who summarily
remove violators from the premises. Ironically, for a contestatory space, New York Jacks
employs a power strategy found in mainstream society: one in which employees monitor
participants, who, in turn, regulate and calibrate their own behavior and that of others.
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   17

Perhaps this structure serves as the club’s ironic but apparently necessary way of “rep-
resenting” while still contesting mainstream culture, to borrow Foucault’s insight from
“Different Spaces” quoted above.
While the power strategy invoked in the previous analysis resembles, at least in
structure, the surveillance that characterized eighteenth- and ­n ineteenth-century
­anti-masturbation power, New York Jacks’ website provides additional evidence of an
instance of power that exceeds ordinary guidelines and rules. Foucault’s essay on “The
Subject and Power” elucidates this broader concept of power. In that essay, he claims that
power is “coextensive with every social relationship” (345)—even one between mutu-
ally masturbating men, we might add. Power is, moreover, nothing more or less than “an
action upon an action, on possible or actual future or present actions” (340). Depend-
ing on its aims, power “incites,” “induces,” “seduces,” “makes easier or more difficult,”
“releases or contrives,” “makes more probable or less,” and, only in “extreme” situations,
“constrains or forbids absolutely” (341). These verbs, along with the verbs from The His-
tory of Sexuality cited above, share a common denominator: “the power to affect […] and
to be affected,” as Gilles Deleuze aptly glosses Foucault’s definition of power (71). Given
that definition of power, it certainly takes little imagination to see how mutual masturba-
tion qualifies as “an action upon action,” an action that, for example, “incites,” “seduces,”
and “releases.” As New York Jacks’ website indicates, while some participants stand, walk
around, watch, and stroke themselves, others enjoy “jacking each other off ” in couples
or in groups and, in so doing, engage in actions on “possible or actual future or present
actions.”
As Foucault broadened his understanding of power relations, he also deepened the
third axis of his genealogies. The example of a masturbation party allows us to grasp
more fully than the first example of ­anti-masturbation discourse the singular, contin-
gent, variable, and even resistant features of subjectivation. Deleuze’s concept of the fold,
a theory of subjectivation derived from Foucault, can assist our investigation. Accord-
ing to Deleuze, “There never ‘remains’ anything of the subject, since he is to be created on
each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize
knowledge and bend each power” (105). In other words, given the knowledges, both con-
ventional and alternative, and given, moreover, the forces that, regardless of aim, affect
and are affected by our own forces, how will we face knowledge and power uniquely in
each and every time and place? How will we (re)create our subjectivity, in words that
Deleuze borrows from Foucault, as “the interior of the exterior” (Foucault, Madness 11;
qtd. in Deleuze 97)?
New York Jacks’ website suggests how participants subjectivize knowledge and
power during sex parties in similar terms. Like the classical “prescriptive” texts whose
advice Greek men were invited to “test out,” the club’s website invites readers to “test out
[its] theories,” including the theory that masturbation parties create “a strange but free-
ing alchemy.” Men who accept this invitation attend “for different reasons,” or for a dif-
ferent “telos,” as Foucault puts it in the fourth facet of subjectivation. Some “watch,” “play
with themselves,” join “circle jerks,” “pair up as couples,” seek “short[-] and long[-]term”
relationships, or simply take “time away from their primary relationship[s].” While at
New York Jacks, men engage in a creative array of masturbatory practices despite the
club’s strict limitations on sexual expression. As the website attests, “[T]he possibilities
for variation of our favorite activity are endless.” Moreover, participants often find them-
selves unexpectedly attracted to different types of men as they participate “in the flesh in
18  Introduction

real time.” In the end, for some men, “[s]ome parties” will be “hotter” than other parties,
depending on attendees’ mutual attraction.
In sum, a New York Jacks party is like the Greek panegyris. Explaining in a lec-
ture from the course on Subjectivity and Truth how Greek men put their lives (bios) into
practice, each in his own singular way, Foucault borrows an analogy from Heraklides
Ponticus:
The panegyris is then this festival [fête] where many people come together and many things
take place. It is the same festival for all. And what will define the bios is the end one sets for one-
self when one comes to the festival, it is the way in which one will put in perspective, perceive
those different choices that are common to everyone and that characterize for them [alone] the
panegyris [253; French interpolation mine from 255 in the original].
If we translate fête as “party,” a more contemporary, informal word choice, we can bet-
ter see just how fitting the analogy is. Loosely retranslated, the passage now reads: a New
York Jacks party is where many men gather and many things happen. It is the same party
for all, but what matters is each participant’s goals, perspectives, and perceptions of those
things common to all.
Both examples—the masturbation abstinent and the masturbation partier—illus-
trate how one might approach the body from a Foucauldian perspective. Although many
Foucauldian analyses attend almost exclusively to the axes of knowledge and power
and, in particular, to those configurations that normalize the body, Foucault actually
offers a broader perspective. This perspective allows us to detect the third axis when it
is explicitly absent, even in Discipline and Punish, a ­go-to text for Foucauldians seek-
ing to understand dominant manifestations of knowledge and power. After presenting
the panopticon, Foucault speaks of “an indefinite discipline”: admittedly an “ideal” sit-
uation that includes among its aims “the permanent measure of a gap [un écart] in rela-
tion to an inaccessible norm” (227; interpolation mine from 228 in the French edition).11
While the passage is intended to describe the impossible goals of disciplinary knowledge
and power, it nonetheless invites us to consider how different subjects might approach
the “gap” between a norm and a deviation from it. While the masturbation abstinent
would likely attempt to close the gap but ultimately fail, the masturbation partier would
undoubtedly seize the inventive potential that the gap affords. As French philosopher
Judith Revel explains, subjectivation for Foucault opens the possibility of an “‘écart’ créa-
tif ” (8), a creative gap. “In life—in so far as it is understood as a creative process,” she
writes, “nothing is ever totally reabsorbed because invention, from the interior of what is
already there, exceeds by definition any perspective of identification and measure” (76;
trans. mine). The Genevan men whose “poetic sexuality” fascinates Abdellah and the
New York Jacks attendees who engage in endlessly varied forms of masturbatory expres-
sion aspire to such invention in spaces that, as Revel repeatedly emphasizes, are deter-
mined by history without being exhausted by it (e.g., 209).

Essays

Becky R. McLaughlin and Eric Daffron

Having introduced The Body in Theory with apotemnophilia and masturbation, two
topics that, like a bad smell, invite disgust in the squeamish, we now turn to (and not
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   19

away from) the essays collected in this volume, beginning with a consideration of olfac-
tion and its relationship to the drive. Arguing that the place of the olfactory is strangely
­under-theorized despite its pivotal role in Freud’s account of the civilizing forces that
have bequeathed us an upright posture, Calum Neill and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco
seek to redress this paucity by sketching out a theory of the olfactory drive using Pat-
rick Süskind’s novel, Perfume, to explore the curious power of the olfactory apparatus.
In “Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive,” they begin and end their explo-
ration of the nose and what might be called its (dis)contents by pointing out that even as
we try to repress the libidinal function of the olfactory drive, its stubborn remnants make
us aware “that at the core of life resides death. Sex, shit, and death.” Although Lauren Jane
Barnett makes use of the eye rather than the nose, and the gaze rather than olfaction, her
Foucauldian approach, like Neill and Di Gianfrancesco’s Lacanian, places death in the
spotlight, not as the drive but as a corpse on the autopsy table. In “The Living and Dead
Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze,” Barnett reconsiders Foucault’s conception of medical
power in relation to the clinical gaze, arguing that, because the clinical gaze has largely
considered the doctor only in relation to living patients, the dead body has not received
the attention that it should have in the space of the clinic. “Leaving out the corpse,” argues
Barnett, “means we only partially understand the clinical gaze.” Thus, Barnett’s aim is to
help theorize the clinical gaze more fully by transferring our gaze from the living body to
the dead.
We are treated to further theorizing, now in the contemporary Lacanian clinic,
when we move from Barnett’s dead body to Leon S. Brenner’s autistic body, a body that
might be considered “dead” in relation to the symbolic order. Referencing Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of the “body without organs,” Brenner argues in “Is the Autistic Body a
Body Without Organs?” that the Lacanian clinic’s approach to autism problematizes the
very notion of “cure,” for instead of attempting to cure the autism that one has, it supports
one in being autistic. In other words, instead of treating autism as an illness, the Laca-
nian clinic treats it as a unique subjective structure or category. In so doing, the Laca-
nian clinic of autism runs counter to clinical approaches, such as Applied Behavioral
Analysis, that aim to condition and normalize the way autistic individuals behave toward
and approach their bodies. Rejecting the idea that the human body “should always func-
tion in normalized ways,” Brenner embraces the Lacanian clinic for encouraging autis-
tic individuals to actively experiment with their bodies and to reconfigure the body’s
most intimate and internal modes of functioning. Like Brenner, who puts in unusual
and creative rapport theorists often seen as antagonistic, Evi Verbeke couples Lacanian
jouissance with Foucauldian resistance in order to formulate a new and more fruitful
approach to the ­self-destructive body than the moralism with which it is often met. In
combining Lacan and Foucault, argues Verbeke, “we can come to a new understanding of
resistance, one grounded in jouissance.” Unlike the approach taken by classic psychiatry,
Verbeke’s approach, outlined in “The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault
and Lacan: Resistance and Jouissance,” does not view ­self-destruction as mere pathology
but as a “black mirror” in which we can see reflected the devastating effects of regulating
discourses such as ­soma-ethics, which insists that we conform to social ideals regarding
the health and vitality of our bodies. In the ­self-harmer’s acts of defiance, argues Verbeke,
the body speaks “a certain truth about the power exercised upon it” and about resistance
to that power.
Resisting the power of a regulating discourse such as “ableism,” Marina Cano brings
20  Introduction

Lacan, particularly his conception of castration and the mirror stage, to bear on disabil-
ity studies. Like Brenner’s focus on the autistic body and Verbeke’s on the ­self-destructive,
Cano focuses on the “disabled” body, drawing upon Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film, The
Shape of Water, to investigate how and why Lacanian theory can be of use to disability
studies in the ­twenty-first century. In “Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body,” Cano notes
that because of film’s visual and voyeuristic qualities, it is a genre uniquely suited to exam-
inations of the body. It is also a genre capable of reflecting and shaping cultural attitudes
and beliefs about the body, hence Cano’s choice of The Shape of Water as her tutor text: “it
provides viewers with a new vocabulary to think about disabled bodies, which breaks the
ableist stranglehold on the body.” Thus, argues Cano, the film transcends the restrictive
binary of able and disabled, allowing for the emergence of new, ­non-normative forms of
subjectivity. Although Michiko Oki writes from a Foucauldian perspective, her treatment
of the hunchback in “The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art: Géri-
cault, Dix, and Salomon” has much in common with Cano’s treatment of the disabled, for
like Cano’s resistance to the regulating discourse of ableism, Oki uses the stooped posture
of the hunchback to challenge the normalized image of the upright human fostered by bio-
political forms of power. In her analysis of the works of Théodore Géricault, Otto Dix, and
Charlotte Salomon, Oki reveals and resists the violence of normative power in contem-
porary biopolitics as defined by Foucault, for these three artists, argues Oki, “inscribe the
time when sovereign power is increasingly transformed into a dispersed mode of power
in biopolitical form, when violence takes shape more and more as an invisible power that
normalizes and controls the human body.” In a sense, then, argues Oki, the hunchback is
the other and/or the double of the normalized upright human figure, not only a body doc-
ile and vulnerable in relation to the mechanism for imposing normalized human life but
also a body that disturbs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, activity and
paralysis: in short, a body that refuses to stay in the shadows but pervades the world from
concentration camp to contemporary society.
Moving from the “outer” world to the “inner,” several essays in this collection inter-
rogate the body in order to come to terms with the ego, or the self, with which it is inev-
itably entangled. Dan Collins tackles this issue head on in “The Ego as Body Image:
Lacan’s Mirror Stage Revisited” by posing a series of questions around a fundamental
tenet of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the definition of the ego as “an identification with a
body image.” By first positing that the ego is not only an image but also a function, he
then proceeds to guide readers through a set of increasingly complex and illuminating
questions, invoking Freud and Lacan at turns. In the end, Collins maintains that the ego
is more than the body image with which it is usually associated. The ego also serves as
function, and that function is dual: one that strives both to vouchsafe the unity of the ego
and to protect it from internal drives and external stimuli. Approaching the self from a
Foucauldian angle, John Halbrooks argues in “Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery in the
Fiction of Patrick O’Brian” that the protagonist of O’Brian’s historical fiction, a naval phy-
sician, engages in a set of complex power relationships with others—but his most com-
plex negotiation occurs with himself. In particular, the physician’s diary marks a peculiar
division between “analytical observer” and “confessing subject,” a division all the more
remarkable when he performs surgery on himself. That scene and related ones provide
Halbrooks with occasions to meditate on how the body shapes the mind and to consider
what it means for the pathologized body to deceive medical power, especially when both
body and doctor coincide in the same person.
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   21

Like the essays by Collins and Halbrooks, two other essays in this collection inves-
tigate the self but this time from the standpoint of technologies that expose our bodies
to others. In “Ego Portrait: ­Self-Photography as Symptom in Contemporary Technocul-
ture,” Chris Vanderwees explores the phenomenon of selfies, a narcissistic byproduct of
early ­twenty-first-century neoliberalism. According to Vanderwees, whenever we take
selfies, we reenact Lacan’s mirror stage. In so doing, we misrecognize ourselves, failing to
see the lack on which every ego is founded. Yet we must sense some reduction of “sym-
bolic efficiency” in our late capitalist technoculture because we repetitively and futilely
compensate for this inefficiency by exhausting our smartphone’s data capacity with more
and more selfies, posting them to Facebook and other social media sites, and sending
them to friends and family. By distributing our selfies at every turn, we ceaselessly make
demands for love and recognition from the symbolic Other and simultaneously leave
ourselves susceptible to the Other’s gaze. Exploring in depth the vulnerable social posi-
tion in which social media and other modern technologies place us, Michael Loadenthal
suggests that these technologies forge a new and disturbing phase of power in his essay,
“Social Media, Biopolitical Surveillance, and Disciplinary Social Control: Aggregating
Data to Examine Docile Bodies.” His probing analysis of various social media platforms
as well as technologies of facial recognition, geolocation, and the like demonstrates how
law enforcement agencies, for example, use these technologies to surveil ordinary citi-
zens, pinpoint them in time and space, and record their latest thoughts and actions. Iron-
ically, we assist these agents of bodily discipline and social control by willingly posting
our whereabouts and similar data for their collection, storage, and use. Although Load-
enthal does not mention selfies, readers might nevertheless imagine how selfies—those
entertaining, memorable ­self-portraits that, according to Vanderwees, we take to shore
up our fragile egos—actually provide the very data that early ­twenty-first-century power
uses to identify, locate, and thereby control us.
If the previous essays give us a paranoid feeling that the Other is always watching
us—and at our peril—the final two essays of this volume remind us that Lacan and Fou-
cault imagined forms of ­self-transformation that promise to dislodge us from our psychi-
cal and social fates. In “From Symptom to Sinthôme: Ridding the ‘Body of Substance’ in
My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Erica D. Galioto reads Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel as the
protagonist’s successful movement from symptom to sinthôme. Early in the novel, the
protagonist avoids pain by repeatedly producing a variety of symptoms that ultimately
hold her accountable to the Other. However, she decisively breaks with this symptom-
atic behavior by following a ­120-day sleeping regime. When she finally awakens, she has
rewritten her body and her desires on her own terms, terms that remain more faithful to
the real than to the symbolic, which had earlier held her in an endless, repetitive cycle.
Irina Chkhaidze charts a different path of transformation in her essay “Posthumanist
Metamorphosis and Discipline: Barney’s Drawing Restraint and Foucault on Raymond
Roussel.” Examining Matthew Barney’s ­multi-media, ­multi-decade art project through
the lens of Foucault’s reading of Raymond Roussel’s poetry and prose, she argues that,
for Barney, physical resistance and art form work ­hand-in-hand, a performance at once
corporeal and artistic that inevitably results in metamorphosis. For Chkhaidze, Fou-
cault’s early fascination with doubles, labyrinths, and the like in Roussel’s work pro-
vides apt inspiration for understanding the intricacies, sometimes unexpected and often
bizarre, that bodily transformation takes in Barney’s artwork. Her larger claim is that
metamorphosis in both Barney and Roussel (via Foucault) is decidedly posthumanist, a
22  Introduction

critical discourse that questions the very foundations of what it means to inhabit a human
body.
Like Chkhaidze’s essay, all of the essays in this volume invite us to reconsider the car-
nal. If these essays’ topics seem diverse, even eclectic at times, they nevertheless unite in
their collective inquiry into the body: what it is, what it does, and what it might become.
In so doing, they sometimes flesh out the body; at other times, they cut it up. In the end,
all of them recognize the value of conversing with Lacan and Foucault on bodily matters.

Notes
1. I owe my formulation of the ­co-existence of social determination and social invention here and in the
previous paragraph to Revel, whose work on Foucault I will soon consider more thoroughly in my section of
our introduction.
2. I make the same argument but in a different context in “Literature, Theory, and the Beatific Effects of
Reading,” 167.
3. Parts of this essay were published in a special issue of Word and Text edited by Christopher Müller and
Mareile Pfannebecker and entitled “Corporalities: Body Limits.” See my “Gothicizing Apotemnophilia: Live
Burial, Secret Desire, and the Uncanny Body of the Amputee Wannabe” for a much lengthier and more fully
developed essay.
4. Although Freud has often been accused of equating anatomy with destiny, he broke with the natural sci-
ences when he argued that the body is ruled, at least in some respects, by the laws of representation and not
of nature. Under Lacan’s influence, in fact, the tendency to read Freud in biological terms has greatly dimin-
ished. And while Lacan has on occasion been understood to use sociohistorical terms to argue that representa-
tion produces the subject, his form of psychoanalysis “focuses on the particularity of the subject in a way that
sociohistorical analyses do not. Even if every subject is profoundly affected by sociohistorical conditions, it is
clear that we are not all ‘products of the symbolic order’ in the same way” (Shepherdson 130).
5. Now the disorder is referred to as Xenomelia or “foreign limb syndrome.”
6. See Joan Copjec, “Cutting Up,” 235.
7. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the international “standard diagnostic tool for epi-
demiology, health management, and clinical purposes” (see Wikipedia.org). Its full, official name is Interna-
tional Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.
8. This is how Bruce Fink signifies the conjunction of the Big Other and the Mother function. Here, he is
following Lacan’s statement, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of ­Psycho-Analysis, that the mother is the first
to occupy the position of the Other ­vis-à-vis the child since she must interpret and respond to the child’s inar-
ticulate cries: “It is in the interval between these two signifiers that resides the desire offered to the mapping of
the subject in the experience of the discourse of the Other, of the first Other he has to deal with, let us say, by
way of illustration, the mother” (A Clinical Introduction 218).
9. In my essay “Transatlantic Terror,” I raise this point by way of Foucault’s The Government of Self and Oth-
ers. That essay also discusses Foucault’s concept of subjectivation, which I address shortly in the current essay,
by way of different passages from The Use of Pleasure. Deleuze, who organizes the second half of his book on
Foucault in terms of these three axes, has generally influenced my understanding of Foucault’s three axes,
especially power and subjectivity.
10. Quoted and paraphrased material about New York Jacks comes from the “News” and “About Us” sec-
tions of its website. Although New York Jacks is my chosen example, many sex clubs with a similar purpose
exist in the United States and beyond, as the website indicates (“Links”).
11. I interpret this passage differently in my essay on the “resistant gap” (36).

Works Cited
Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, editor. Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. McFar-
land, 2010.
Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Copjec, Joan. “Cutting Up.” Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan, Routledge, 1989,
pp. 227–46.
_____. “Montage of the Drives.” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, vol. 1, pp. 11–13.
Daffron, Eric. “The Resistant Gap: Foucault, Lacan, and Resistance.” POMPA, 2003, pp. 34–40.
 Introduction (McLaughlin & Daffron)   23

_____. “Transatlantic Terror: James Hammond’s Circulating Library and the Minerva Press Gothic Novel.”
Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, vol. 23, Summer 2020, http://www.romtext.
org.uk/articles/rt23_n07/.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán Hand, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Dollimore, Jonathan. “The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault.” Genders,
vol. 8, 1990, pp. 1–16.
Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets, Harcourt, Inc., 1971, pp. 49–59.
Elliott, Carl. Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. Norton, 2003.
Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University
Press, 1997.
_____. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal. Edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, translated by Graham
Burchell, Picador, 2003. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75.
_____. “Body/Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited Colin Gor-
don, translated by Colin Gordon et al., Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 55–62.
_____. “Different Spaces.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by
Robert Hurley et al., 1998, pp. 175–85. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, general editor, Paul Rabinow,
vol. 2, The New Press, 1997–2000.
_____. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1979.
_____. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited
by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 1997, pp. 281–301. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–
1984, general editor, Paul Rabinow, vol. 1, The New Press, 1997–2000.
_____. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, vol. 1, Vintage, 1990.
_____. “Lacan, the Liberator of Psychoanalysis: Interview with A. Ghizzardi Nobécourt.” Corriere della sera,
vol. 106, no. 212, September 1981, p. 1.
_____. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard,
Vintage Books, 1973.
_____. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited
by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 1997, pp. 253–80. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–
1984, general editor, Paul Rabinow, vol. 1, The New Press, 1997–2000.
_____. The Punitive Society. Edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2015. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973.
_____. “Society Must Be Defended.” Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David
Macy, Picador, 2003. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976.
_____. “The Subject and Power.” Power, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 2000, pp.
326–48. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, general editor, Paul Rabinow, vol. 3, The New Press, 1997–2000.
_____. Subjectivité et verité. Edited by Frédéric Gros, EHESS Gallimard/Seuil, 2014. Cours au Collège de
France, 1980–1981.
_____. Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan,
2017. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981.
_____. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Gallimard, 1975.
_____. The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley, 1990. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, Vintage,
1988–1990.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by Philip Rieff, Macmillan Publish-
ing Company, 1963, pp. 214–19.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1977.
_____. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II.
Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, Norton, 1991.
_____. Television. Edited by Joan Copjec, translated by Denis Hollier, et al., Norton, 1990.
Loeb, Elizabeth. “Cutting It Off: Bodily Integrity, Identity Disorders, and the Sovereign Stakes of Corporeal
Desire in U.S. Law.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 44–63.
McLaughlin, Becky. “Gothicizing Apotemnophilia: Live Burial, Secret Desire, and the Uncanny Body of the
Amputee Wannabe.” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 3, no. 2, Dec. 2013, pp.
133–47.
_____. “Literature, Theory, and the Beatific Effects of Reading.” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight
to the Dark Knight, edited by Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp.
159–174.
New York Jacks. 2020. https://www.nyjacks.com.
­Nishat-Botero, Yousaf. “The Advent of the Subject: The Theory of Freedom in Lacan’s Rome Discourse.” Aca-
demia.edu, 11 Dec. 2019, pp. 1–41.
Orlan. This Is My Body... This Is My Software.... Translated by Tanya Augsburg and Michel A. Moos, Black Dog,
1996.
24  Introduction

Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Revel, Judith. Foucault avec ­Merleau-Ponty: Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Vrin, 2015.
Shepherdson, Charles. “The Epoch of the Body: Need and Demand in Kojève and Lacan.” Perspective on
Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, edited by Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, Routledge,
1999, pp. 183–211.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Bantam Books, 1981.
Taïa, Abdellah. Salvation Army. Translated by Frank Stock, Semiotext(e), 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man.” October, vol. 54, Fall 1990, pp. 19–38.
 Towards an Understanding
of the Olfactory Drive
Calum Neill and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco

The Olfactory in Freud and Lacan

Despite the pivotal role it is accorded in Freud’s account of civilization, the place of
the olfactory remains curiously ­under-theorized in the psychoanalytic canon. In Stud-
ies in Hysteria, the case of Miss Lucy R. focuses on an analysand suffering from olfactory
hallucinations. Noting that it is rather unusual for “olfactory sensations to be chosen as
mnemic symbols in trauma” (107), Freud nonetheless accords the sensations a place not
unlike that of the scopic in terms of association. The recalled smells function as uncon-
scious carriers for the repressed screen memory, which itself covers Miss Lucy’s trauma.
Similarly, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud positions smells on a level akin to words,
insofar as, like the latter, smells function in a metonymical slide with one smell com-
ing to stand in for another (116). In the Three Essays on Sexuality, however, the olfactory
appears to be acknowledged with a weight peculiarly its own when Freud mentions in a
footnote that a key root of fetishism lies in the repressed coprophilic pleasure associated,
for example, with feet and hair. This partial reversal of the pleasurable and the unplea-
surable in the olfactory realm is echoed in Freud’s more extensive, but still rather brief,
comments in Civilization and Its Discontents. There he describes olfactory repression as
the “deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization” (106),
according the olfactory a pivotal role in human evolution as the transformation of the
pleasure of scent to a displeasure in scent motivates our shift to an erect posture.
The link, then, is clear, for Freud, between the olfactory and the libidinal, with a spe-
cific but not exclusive link being drawn to anal eroticism. But, where our understand-
ing and exploration of other libidinal modes or drives—the scopic, the oral, the anal,
and even the vocular—have been noted and extended, there appears to be something of
a paucity of writing on the olfactory. This essay seeks to make a small step towards rec-
tifying this omission with the beginnings of a brief sketch of the possibilities of a theory
of the olfactory drive. The exploration of the theory will be sharpened through consider-
ation of Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume, perhaps the most exemplary cultural rumina-
tion on the power of the olfactory.
Freud’s brief discussion of the olfactory in Civilization and Its Discontents appears
to posit this particular libidinal mode as a liminal point between animalistic ­pre-culture
and ­self-styled civilization. Olfactory stimuli, Freud argues, have less importance to us

25
26   The Body in Theory

than other sensory stimuli, and yet, apparently contradicting this claim, he also states
that “there exist even in Europe peoples among whom the strong genital odours which
are so repellent to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give them
up” (106). We might even question the strength of Freud’s initial assumption of the dimi-
nution in significance of scent. While we may no longer overtly and consciously navigate
the world through our sense of smell, does this not perhaps suggest all the more that the
olfactory may enjoy a greater link to the unconscious? Smells catch us by surprise. They
provoke strong reactions, from profound disgust and repulsion to deep fascination and
inexplicable attraction. It is not simply that smell locks us into a relation with our ances-
tral past. Inevitably, its resonance must exceed the mere biological and give it a socially
and culturally mediated place. If smell is our most ancient contact with the world, then
it is also, insofar as we have not traveled so far from that ancient state, ripe for ideologi-
cal positioning.
Current ­bio-psychological research has been concerned with attempting to solve
the mystery of love and attraction by deploying pheromones as a leading explanation.
A ­meta-analysis recently published in the Journal of Acute Disease has reviewed vari-
ous studies concerning this matter and concluded that pheromones, in their aphrodisiac
capacity, are what govern human sexual activity (Semwal et al.). Not only does this per-
spective raise numerous important questions concerning human agency, but also it draws
our attention to an important aspect of the drive itself. The notion that sexual activity and
thus sexual choices are governed and not merely influenced at a biological level cannot
but raise questions of forensic responsibility for a society that has placed at its center a
belief in a rational, ­self-possessed, psychologized individualism. A robust theory of the
drive might be understood as part of a potentially productive counter argument to this
psychologism. Conclusions such as Journal of Acute Disease help us to understand the
embodied but headless nature of the drive and, through so doing, help us to resist the
hegemonic psychologization that seeks to recuperate psychoanalytic insights into what
we might call “psychological realism.”
Smells not only, for better or worse, attract. They also, obviously, repel. In terms of
race, religion, gender, and class, smell has been used to demarcate differences between dif-
ferent groups in what might be understood as an attempt to establish some sort of “olfac-
tory supremacy” (Stokes; Babilon). The truth, however, is that ultimately ­no-body smells
all good. Many, if not most, people may very well enjoy the smells that are produced from
their own bodies in some sort of “olfactory narcissism” (Sutherland), but it is exceptional
for this enjoyment to be shared by others, and thus this narcissistic pleasure comes to be
infused with guilt or shame in company. To an extent, our bodily odors are a sign that
we are alive, that our bodies are continuing to function. Such functioning also then indi-
cates what George Bataille refers to as the “ferment of life” (54), drawing the connection
between life and death. Our odorous ­self-indulgence appears to point to a very human
paradox: that as long as we live, we are living towards death. In this sense, our bodily
smells constitute a perpetual reminder of our caducity. Our bodies are in an inexorable
process of decomposition, which leaves an olfactory trace of our motion towards death.
Bodily odors are a reminder of our imperfection. This perhaps accounts, to some extent,
for the negative reception of what is, after all, quite natural. From the outset of civilization,
humankind has sought to master, expel, and cover over the olfactory remnants that make
us aware—even, or especially, if only unconsciously—that at the core of life resides death.
Sex, shit, and death. Has there ever been a construct so salient to psychoanalysis?
 Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive (Neill & Di Gianfrancesco)   27

In discussing his theory of the drives in his eleventh seminar, Lacan draws our atten-
tion to their liminal associations. The classic bodily drives each pertain to an area of the
body that marks the indeterminate point between an inside and an outside, a rim: the
mouth, the urethral meatus, the eye, the ear, and, then, one might assume, the nostril. In
both the Écrits and the seminars, however, we find only occasional and brief mentions
of olfaction. In the “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” Lacan
mentions, somewhat disparagingly, some analysts who have brought the olfactory into
the clinic as a measure of felicitous transference (509 Écrits 610). Elsewhere, however, in
“The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956,” he alludes
to an olfactory drive in discussing Jonathan Swift’s The Grand Mystery: Or, Art of Meditat-
ing Over an House of Office, Restor’d and Unveil’d. Here, the drive is situated in relation to
the rhinencephalon, the region of the brain associated with the sense of smell (390 Écrits
466). Lacan’s explicit point here is that, in terms of bodily experience, the drives, what-
ever their specific location, are always “structure[d] in the terms of language” (509 Écrits
610). This is a point worth emphasizing and keeping in mind: while smells are intimately
connected to our bodies, they are always also entwined with discourse. It is not, then,
simply a matter of what smells do but always also a question of what we do with smells.

Drives in Freud and Lacan

In a footnote added in the third edition of his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud
remarks that, despite the pivotal importance played by drives in psychoanalysis, they
mark “the least complete portion of psychoanalytic theory” (168). Lacan might be under-
stood to have rectified this lack, positing the drive as one of the four fundamental con-
cepts of psychoanalysis in Seminar XI. When introducing the drive, Lacan is careful to
distinguish it from need. Need articulates with what Freud had referred to as an external
excitement. There is, Lacan asserts, no element of the pressure of this external excitement
in the drive. The pressure proper to the drive is what Freud had referred to as an internal
excitement. The rhythm of need is such that it can be characterized by the achievement
and fading of satiety. One experiences, for example, hunger. One eats. Hunger abates.
But, then, before too long one will inevitably feel hungry again. The possibility of satis-
faction, in relation to needs, also points to the fact that needs have objects. Sticking with
the example of hunger, the object would obviously be food. It is the location of this object
that provides the momentary satisfaction of the need. The force of the drive has a radi-
cally different rhythm. “As far as the object in drives is concerned,” Lacan tells us, “[i]t is a
matter of total indifference” (168). Where the rhythm of need is one of oscillation, moving
from one state to another, the rhythm of drive is characterized by circulation, meaning
the force of drive is constant (165). This necessarily points to a rather different under-
standing of satisfaction than that used in connection with needs. As Alenka Zupančič
puts it, while partial drives are “involved in all kinds of partial surplus satisfaction,” we
must also understand drives as entailing a “purely disruptive pulsating negativity that
gives them their singular rhythm and torsion” (103). This rhythm and torsion are what
led Lacan to go beyond Freud, concluding in “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalysts’s
Desire” that “every drive is virtually a death drive” (719 Écrits 848). With this statement,
Lacan might be understood to be pointing to the fact that “the death drive is not one
among the (partial) drives, but refers to an active split or declination within every drive”
28   The Body in Theory

(Zupančič 102). This ontological negativity pertaining to all drives arises from a split
inaugurated with the individual’s inevitable entrance into the symbolic realm. The idea
of a purely needing being would have to be posited as existing prior to any emergence in
the order of language. Once in language, being is lost to meaning, and the emerging sub-
ject must be understood as animated by desire. The ontogenesis of this subject relies on a
presupposed mythical, primordial, ­pre-linguistic wholeness that it then aspires to rein-
state. There is, however, a risk of what we might call a ­subjective-centric focus in this
emphasis on desire. Lacan’s shift to prioritizing the drive, while never dispensing with
the notion of desire, helps us to grasp the crucial decentering force already evident in
Freud’s work. There is always the danger of projecting a fatal romanticism onto the the-
ory of desire—the idea of each subject hopelessly striving towards singular completion,
ever doomed to find that the supposed object of desire is not in fact it. Through his focus
on the drive, Lacan helps us avoid the lure of this recuperation to what can so easily seem
like individualism.
In “The Position of the Unconscious,” Lacan concocts his own myth, the myth of the
“L’Hommelette” or lamella. In his Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes posit the origins of
love through a tale of the original human beings who were ­egg-like. Due to their hubris,
their ­self-contained satisfaction or seeming wholeness, Zeus strikes them with lightning,
severing each egg into two halves. Rendered incomplete, human beings now roam the
earth in search of their other half. Playing on the notion of the egg, and the homoph-
ony in French between “little man” and omelette, Lacan extrapolates his own myth based
on the membrane. Lamella is the biological name for such a membrane. Put very sim-
ply, Lacan’s point is that, unlike ­non-sexually reproducing organisms like bacteria, the
human organism is structurally limited in such a way as to render it a being towards
death. Recoiling from the mortal condition, we, like the creatures in Aristophanes’s tale,
hanker after the lost state of completeness. The sting here is that the lost state never was,
and so it can never be refound. Making one of his occasional appeals to biology, Lacan
points out how a newborn baby is necessarily separated from the placenta (717 Écrits
846). Even on this simple biological level, he argues, we are obviously incomplete. The
greater experience of incompleteness, however, arises from our emergence in language.
As the utterly ­non-natural nature of language is our only possibility of being human, in
the sense of being speaking beings, we are constitutively severed from our own origins.
This is the notorious Lacanian barred subject, barred in the multiple senses of crossed out
(sous rature), prohibited, and divided. Within the symbolic order, the subject is consti-
tuted as a subject of and to language. The notion of a subject of (pure) need is only ever
posited retroactively from the position of its already having been lost. A name for this
lost thing, supposed to have been a part of ourselves, is lamella. While in a rational sense
it might be said neither to exist nor to have existed, this does not stop its having very real
effects. Precisely as constitutively lost, the lamella lingers and haunts the subject’s life
and, in so doing, gives rise to the drive. As ­Marie-Hélène Brousse succinctly puts it, “The
signifier bars need and produces the drive” (106).
By differentiating between needs and drives, Lacan draws an important distinc-
tion between sex and biology. The body understood as governed by need, what we might
understand as the biological body, is a body not yet sexualized. On the other hand, the
body understood as governed by the drive is a sexualized body (Jaanus 121). This oper-
ation might be conceptualized as the transposition of the “real neutral body” (Seminar
XI 175) of needs into the realm of the symbolic. This supposed shift into the symbolic
 Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive (Neill & Di Gianfrancesco)   29

simultaneously implies something having been left behind and accounts, retrospectively,
for the experience of impossible loss. The emergence of the drive in this operation thus
sutures two seemingly distinct elements: death and sex.
While Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle retains the dichotomic conceptualiza-
tion of the drive—moving through the binary sexual drive/ego or ­self-preservation drive
to a division between life (Eros) and death (Thanatos) drives—Lacan’s notion of lamella
helps us to understand that all drives are, from the outset, both death drives and sexual
drives. Sexuality is thus not opposed to the death drive—as in the Freudian Eros/Thana-
tos couple—but rather they are one and the same (Zupančič 116).
The lamella, which would necessarily once have been close to the becoming sub-
ject, is consequently presented as threatening and frightening, occupying an uncanny
position between pleasure and (the premonition or even promise of ) death. It is from
this myth of lamella that Lacan develops his theory of objet petit a, the lamella account-
ing for the mythic origin of the ­non-object and the later theory of objet petit a account-
ing for this ­non-object’s persisting function or functional location. The drive circles this
fantasmatic object, neither aiming to seize it, close in on it, nor move beyond it. In short,
it is drawn to but simultaneously repelled by that which sustains both its movement and
its distance.

The Olfactory Drive

Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, published in 1985, provides us with one of the clear-
est and most sustained cultural ruminations on the place of the olfactory. Here, we wit-
ness an overt and performative circling of objet petit a as the protagonist of the story,
­Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, desperately seeks the supposed lost object that he imagines has
set in motion that which defines him. Grenouille is born and raised in a pungent Paris,
a Paris where “people stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the
stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions; and from their bodies, if they
were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous
disease” (3). There, at what Süskind calls the “most putrid spot in the whole kingdom”—
where the lives of both peasants and aristocracy alike are accompanied by a pervasive and
constant “stench”—Grenouille was born.
Shortly after his birth, after failing to kill him, his mother abandons Grenouille.
Fated to survive, he begins to absorb the world, but he does so through two very dis-
tinct modes. Like any other child, he learns to speak. However, he has difficulty with
“words designating nonsmelling objects, with abstract ideas and the like, especially those
of an ethical or moral nature” (25). He simply cannot remember these words. He confuses
them with one another and “even as an adult used them unwillingly and often incor-
rectly” (25). While faltering with so much of everyday language, he also experiences its
inadequacy when it comes to describing the world of smells as it fails to capture all of “the
olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself ” (25).
Bemoaning this inadequacy of alienating language 1—so radically different from
the world he experiences with his body—Grenouille takes solace in his ability to smell.
But his ability to “[grasp] his surroundings olfactorily” (26) goes beyond normal human
capabilities, rendering him a sort of olfactory genius. During Grenouille’s stay at Madam
Gaillard’s orphanage, his remarkable olfaction leads her to think that “the lad had second
30   The Body in Theory

sight” (28). Madam Gaillard cannot guess that the small child’s ability belongs neither
to the scopic realm nor to that of magic but, instead, to the olfactory. Grenouille, in fact,
cannot “see any of these things with his eyes, but rather caught their scents with a nose
that from day to day smelled such things more keenly and precisely” (27–28).
His genius is not restricted to the passive ability to recognize, as remarkable as this in
itself may be. From as early as the age of six, Grenouille is able not only to recall the various
smells amassed in his experience but also “by sheer imagination to arrange new combina-
tions of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world” (26).
Despite his genius and ability to combine raw odors, turning them into novel and
exquisite perfumes, Grenouille is caught off guard one night when he stumbles upon a girl’s
exquisite scent. As soon as his nostrils catch the scent, he is convinced “that unless he pos-
sessed this scent, his life would have no meaning” (42). This scent seems to Grenouille to be
“the key for ordering all odors” without which “his heart [could not] be at peace” (38). The
scent is so “inconceivable” and “indescribable” that not only does Grenouille conclude that
“it really ought not to exist at all” (40), but also it causes him for the first time in his life to
doubt his remarkable nose (41). It is only at this point that Grenouille is truly born. His nose
and the whole of his body are awakened: “for until now he had merely existed like an ani-
mal with a most nebulous ­self-awareness” (43). We might say that it is at this point that real
desire is awakened in Grenouille, even though he is not yet able to name it.
In a scene that literalizes one of Lacan’s most provocative statements, “I love you,
but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the object petit a—I
mutilate you,” Grenouille strangles the girl so that he can smell her from head to toe.
Having killed her, in his first clumsy attempt to possess the overwhelmingly exciting
scent she carried, Grenouille realizes that “he must become a creator of scents. And not
just an average one. But, rather, the greatest perfumer of all time” (44). Grenouille’s jour-
ney, his quest to master the perfect perfume, is thus set in motion. However, before leav-
ing Paris he must, just “like a child,” learn the art of perfumery (81).
In Baldini’s shop—one of the most renowned and decadent perfume shops in Paris—
Grenouille learns almost everything about the art of crafting perfumes, everything except
how to “distill radically new scents” (104) and how to preserve them—something he had
failed to do with the murder of the girl. His desire to know how to prolong the life of scents
forces him to leave Baldini’s shop and move from Paris to the South of France, where he
hopes to master the science behind the preservation of scents. Far from Paris, Grenouille,
reluctant to have his “newfound respiratory freedom ruined […] by the sultry climate of
humans” (116), retreats to the Plomb du Cantal’s volcano. There, burrowed in a crypt, Gre-
nouille spends “well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and
in total immobility,” able in this way to “[enjoy] himself ” (123). In his cave, far from any
other human beings, Grenouille withdraws “solely for his own personal pleasure, only to
be nearer to himself ” (123). However, it is in this moment of extreme autoerotic pleasure
that he discovers—as revealed in a dream—that he himself is odorless.
This is something that does not come as a surprise to the novel’s readers, who are
aware of Grenouille’s lack of smell from the very beginning of the story. For Grenouille,
however, it comes as a terrifying revelation. He desperately attempts to smell himself
but fails to do so. Climbing to the peak of the volcano, where he had momentarily found
peace until that terrible nightmare, Grenouille does “everything possible to extract his
own odor from his clothes” (136). In smelling himself and his clothing, Grenouille can
detect “a thousand other odors” but not his own (136). Here Grenouille is forced to
 Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive (Neill & Di Gianfrancesco)   31

confront an entirely different lack. When he smelled the young girl whom he felt com-
pelled to murder, his desire was awakened through an encounter with a lack that he sub-
sequently seeks to fill through the act of possession. Now he is confronted with a more
profound lack as he starts to recognize the fundamental lack at the core of his being.
This confrontation fills him with a deep anxiety: “As he sat there shivering and trying to
gather his confused, terrified thoughts,” Süskind writes, “he knew one thing for sure: he
would change his life, if only because he did not want to dream such a frightening dream
a second time. He would not survive it a second time” (134). This absence of odor is
understood by Grenouille as a lack of an odor that should have been there. Thus, from an
experience of absence, he creates, as we all do, a supposed but lost presence. Grenouille
can then be understood to be not merely without an odor but, rather, as “­with-without”
an odor (Zupančič 49). This absent presence is posited at and as the core of his subjectiv-
ity as that which might give his life purpose and as that which must be retrieved in order
to protect him from annihilation. Driven to fashion a scent for himself, Grenouille leaves
the volcano for the town of Grasse. Smelling his way around France, he thus begins his
incessant circling around his lost object cause, an “object” that takes the elusive form of
a scent. Grenouille’s pulsion towards his lost object is presented in all its ambiguous and
paradoxical nature. The lost odor is both craved and, simultaneously, avoided. It is kept at
a distance (Lacan, Seminar XI 120).
If initially Grenouille is terrified by his discovery of the absence of an odor of his
own, he soon realizes that such a lack also grants him a certain degree of freedom and
mastery not only over his own body but also over others. Odorless and able to craft the
most magnificent scents, Grenouille realizes that “he who ruled scents ruled the hearts
of men” (155). Thus, driven by a renewed realization of his own extraordinary power,
Grenouille “no longer avoid[s] busy roads and cities, he [makes] no detours” (165). Sure
of where he needs to go, he resumes his journey. Here we see more sharply the distinc-
tion and relation between desire and the drive. Confronted with his unbearable lack,
Grenouille is set on a journey. On the level of desire, this journey appears as a linear
trajectory towards power. The drive has its own route, less concerned with Grenouille’s
subjective position, returning his body to its starting point.
From his very first killing, Grenouille is ensnared by the power of the scent of his
victims.2 After several twists and turns, including a series of murders of olfactorily attrac-
tive young women whose scents he steals, Grenouille is finally able to obtain possession
of a scent of his own. In Grasse, he finds and takes a final olfactory “note” from a victim to
add to the new perfume he has been concocting for himself. He now reflects on how he is
able, finally, “to rule the hearts of men.” He is, of course, caught and sentenced to death, a
sentence he is easily able to escape, given his newfound powers. What he seems powerless
to control, however, is his own circular tour, the relentless force driving him back to the
Paris of his birth. The metaphor here is plain: wherever desire takes us, the drive returns
us to that from whence we came. At this point in the novel, we might say that Grenouille
is left with nothing else towards which to aim. The supposed object of his desire may pro-
duce a certain satisfaction, but it is not the completion for which he had hoped. Back in
Paris, he douses himself with the perfume of his own making and is savagely devoured by
a group of homeless Parisians. It is at this point that true jouissance is attained, the point
at which absolute pleasure and all engulfing pain become inextricably entwined. And it
is, of course, a point, an experience that the subject cannot bear.
But what of the drive at this point? Here Süskind allows us to understand the true
32   The Body in Theory

headless, asubjective nature of the drive. Grenouille pursues his desire to the end, to his
end. The drive, however, continues unabated. Through all the twists and turns of Gre-
nouille’s story, the drive relentlessly follows its circuit.
“The satisfaction of the Trieb is,” as Lacan says, “paradoxical, since it seems to occur
elsewhere, it is where its aim is” (Seminar XI 111). Enjoyment, or jouissance, is, in fact,
not in the object but in the pursuit of it (McGowan 31). If, however, the satisfaction of
the drive is obtained through the act of repetition, through the perpetual circling of the
object, then what is to stop this repetition from continuing ad infinitum? Might not the
drive be sustained infinitely? Insofar as we understand the drive as subjectively con-
tained, as his or her drive, then, no, the drive must come to an end just as the subject
does. We might say that something of the bodily real interrupts here. Immortality is not
yet a possibility. Something more, however, is in play. Zupančič puts it thus: “the excess
of excitation exists only through repetition which strives to bind it, and hence points to a
split at the very heart of repetition itself” (112).
The repetition of the drive is unsustainable because of the very repetition itself. The
movement of the drive is a movement towards nothingness. What has to be grasped, here,
is that the object at the heart of the drive is never anything more than an empty place.
What governs the drive is pure repetition. While Grenouille wants to believe that what
sustains him, what gives him meaning, is an odor of his own for which he is searching,
what actually sustains him is the search itself, including the repetitive murders. Although
the scents he collects accumulate, he always requires just one more: none of his victims
is ever sufficient to his desire. The object, in this sense, is not it. The movement is it. And
as this movement repeats, each circulation, through the very fact of returning, repeating,
performs a refining of itself as repetition. It is not the thing that is circulated that counts,
nor is it what is repeated. It is the repetition itself. It is in this sense that all drives are the
death drive: a movement towards nothingness.
The mortal core of the bodily scent that accompanies us, whether smothered in
fancy fragrances or narcissistically savored, allows us to appreciate the specificity of the
olfactory drive. More than the more fully elaborated scopic and aural drives, the olfac-
tory drive carries death with it at each turn. Like the ear, the nose cannot close itself. Like
the eye, it is narcissistic in its obsessive attempts to grasp the self. The eye can be under-
stood to turn from perception—from seeing and the more consciously active looking—
to proprioception, i.e., the reflective positing of the subject in the world. In a similar
fashion, the olfactory organ turns from perceptive modes of smelling to a propriocep-
tive grasping of itself in the world, a positing of itself as being smelled. Süskind appears
to know that ultimately the scent of our own dying is there from the beginning and is that
around which we orient ourselves, for that is why he places Grenouille’s first moments of
life on the most putrid spot in Paris. Understanding the olfactory drive thus allows us to
understand the significance of death in the death drive in a way that can remain obscure
in the other modes of the drive. Sex, death, and shit. They were all there from the begin-
ning, repeating in an ­ever-faltering rhythm towards the end.

Notes
1. Grenouille acquires language differently from any other child. His interest in words is guided only by
his need to give a name to the odors he perceives in his surroundings. “Grenouille” is from a young age “less
concerned with verbs, adjectives and expletives. Except for ‘yes’ and ‘no’—which, by the way, he used for the
 Towards an Understanding of the Olfactory Drive (Neill & Di Gianfrancesco)   33

first time quite late—he used only nouns, and essentially only for concrete objects, plants, animals or human
beings—and only if the objects, plants, animals or human beings suddenly overcame him with their odour”
(25). As far as “abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature,” he could not “retain
them” and remains even in adult life confused by their meaning (26).
2. Süskind writes, “Grenouille followed it, his fearful heart pounding, for he suspected that it was not he
who followed the scent, but the scent that had captured him and was drawing him irresistibly to it” (40).

Works Cited
Babilon, Daniela. The Power of Smell in American Literature: Odour, Affect, and Social Inequality. Peter Lang
Editions, 2017.
Bataille, Georges. Essential Writings. Edited by Michael Richardson, Sage, 1998.
Brousse, ­Marie-Hélène. “The Drive (I).” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Marie Jaanus, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and
Culture, 1995, pp. 99–107.
Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21 (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other
Works, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, translated by James Strachey, Vintage, 1961, pp. 57–151.
_____. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. 4 (1900): Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans-
lated by James Strachey, Vintage, 1966.
_____. “Studies in Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
2 (1893–1895): Studies in Hysteria, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, translated by James Strachey,
Vintage, 1955.
_____. “Three Essays on Sexuality.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume 7 (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, edited by James
Strachey and Anna Freud, translated by James Strachey, Vintage, 1953, pp. 125–248.
Jaanus, Marie. “The Demontage of the Drive.” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psy-
choanalysis, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Marie Jaanus, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and
Culture, 1995, pp. 119–36.
Lacan, Jacques. “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition
in English, edited and translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 489–542.
_____. Écrits. Seuil; Champ Freudien edition, 1966.
_____. “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, edited
and translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 722–25.
_____. “Position of the Unconscious.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, edited and translated by
Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 703–21.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated
by Alan Sheridan, Karnak, 2004.
_____. “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysis 1956.” Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English, edited and translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 384–441.
McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Costs of Free Markets. Columbia University Press, 2016.
Semwal, Alok, et al. “Pheromones and Their Role as Aphrodisiacs: A Review.” Journal of Acute Dis-
ease, vol. 2, no. 4, 2013, pp. 253–61. Science Direct, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S2221618913601407
Stokes, Adrian. “Strong Smells and Polite Society.” A Game That Must Be Lost, Carcanet Press Publication,
1973, pp. 23–37.
Süskind, Patrick. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Translated by John E. Woods, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Sutherland, John. Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography. Reaktion Books, 2017.
Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? The MIT Press, 2017.
 The Living and Dead Body
in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze
Lauren Jane Barnett

Medicine has had a profound impact on our lives—and on our deaths. The increas-
ing control and power exercised by the medical community over Western patients has
been a topic of controversy since Michel Foucault published The Birth of the Clinic in
1963. As I will elaborate, in The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argued that through the use
of specialist medical knowledge and, in particular, the clinical gaze, the teaching hospital
has exercised control over the patient. Even after publication of The Birth of the Clinic, it
took decades for social history to consider the impact of medicine’s control over the dead.
In 2004, Dr. John Tercier—drawing on the work of social historian Phillippe Ariès
in the eighties—argued that technological advancements in medicine led to the dom-
inance of a “­high-tech” medical death in the majority of the West (­18­–​19). Increasing
numbers of people die in a hospital as the mode of death and the management of the
corpse have fallen under medical expertise. It is with this increased medical attention
to the corpse in mind that, fifty years later, I wish to reconsider Foucault’s conception of
medical power espoused in the clinical gaze. Within Foucault’s work, the clinical gaze is
largely considered in relation to the ­doctor-patient relationship, specifically the ­doctor–
living patient relationship. Foucault’s emphasis has resulted in a lack of analysis and con-
sideration of the dead body in the space of the clinic. Leaving out the corpse, as I will
demonstrate, means that in interpreting and applying Foucault’s concept today, we only
partially understand the clinical gaze.
In this essay, I examine the clinical gaze with respect to the cadaver. I will estab-
lish that the cadaver, because it has no possibility of resisting the gaze, is fundamentally
distinct from the living body. I will then consider the implications of this distinction,
arguing that the clinical gaze does not cease to have power over the patient after death.
In drawing out the distinctions between the living and the dead patient, one can track
the changes in the power relationship between patient and clinician. The patient’s body
begins as an object submitted to the power of the gaze and expertise of the clinician, then
the body is liberated from that power through death, and finally it is subsumed into bio-
power as a cadaver. Ultimately, I will argue that the cadaver, rather than being objec-
tified by the gaze as a living body would be, contributes to and informs the power of
the clinician over the patient, affirming the existing institutional power of medicine. I
will also argue that the clinical gaze is bolstered by other ­non-visual stimuli, an under-
appreciated aspect of clinical knowledge in Foucault’s work. These ­n on-visual cues

34
 The Living and Dead Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze (Barnett)  35

continue in death, demonstrating the persistence of the gaze even as power structures
change.
In order to understand the living and dead bodies within the clinical gaze, one must
first appreciate those traits that are essential to clinical looking, bearing in mind that
they most often took place in relation to a living body. In The Birth of the Clinic, Fou-
cault described le regard—the gaze—unique to la clinique, a term that referred to a teach-
ing hospital as well as to clinical medicine.1 The gaze of the clinician, or the clinical gaze,
penetrates the body of the patient to reveal the invisible, internal structures of the body
and to bring to light the “truth” of a disease (45–49). The clinical gaze is not limited to the
clinic but includes any interaction between a patient and surgeons, medical students, or
physicians. These interactions have changed and expanded since the eighteenth century,
but in all cases, the clinical gaze is both “detached” and “objectifying” in that it trans-
forms the patient from a living, subjective individual (i.e., one whose personal feelings,
autonomy, and unique identity are recognized and valued) into a site of medical investi-
gation (Shapiro 162).
The objectification of the gaze is fundamental to its interaction with the body. The
gaze, Foucault argues, is necessarily objectifying because its function is to distill the disease
from the plethora of visual information provided by the patient’s body. In so doing, the clin-
ical gaze rejects the subjectivity of both the doctor and the patient: “they are tolerated [by
the gaze] as disturbances that can hardly be avoided: the paradoxical role of medicine con-
sists, above all, in neutralizing them” (8). The clinical gaze strips away any personal feelings
or attitudes either party may have about the patient or the disease. This stripping away is an
act of objectification that underpins the ­doctor-patient power dynamic.
While both the doctor and the patient are objectified before the clinical gaze, the
doctor wields the gaze and is thereby elevated to the status of specialist. Such an elevation
creates a power dynamic in which the doctor exerts power over the patient: the power to
use the gaze to objectify the patient, to discover the disease, and to cure or treat the dis-
ease. As the doctor learns through the gaze, the patient is objectified and essentialized to
only those bodily parts the doctor deems relevant: “The clinic demands as much of the
gaze as natural history […] to see, to isolate features, to recognize those that are identi-
cal and those that are different, to regroup them, to classify them by species or families”
(108–09). By isolating different parts of the body, the doctor can identify the disease, but
the whole body of the patient is made insignificant by this process.
Foucault did not consider the possibility that the living patient might counter the
gaze. However, within the possibility of resistance lies the essential difference between
the living and dead bodies under the clinical gaze. A living body can always resist the
medical gaze but usually submits for health reasons. Clinical psychologist and researcher
Johanna Shapiro suggests that patients allow or even invite the clinical gaze “in exchange
for explanation and relief of suffering” (161). The patient is willing to allow the gaze to
penetrate and segment the body in the search for diseased parts with the ultimate goal
of “relieving” that body. Similarly, medical sociologist David Armstrong’s reading of the
clinical gaze within the social body argues that by preferencing the search for disease
over the patient and his or her narrative, “the autonomous identity of the patient [is]
alienated by the new mechanistic forms of clinical practice” (20). The alienation of auton-
omy means that the patient is necessarily separated not only from the body but also from
the sense of personal power before the clinical gaze. Personal power is not lost precisely
but is exchanged for medical expertise.
36   The Body in Theory

The implications of a patient handing such power to the doctor are expressed by Sha-
piro, who outlined how the gaze challenges the personhood of the patient: “The gaze dis-
sected, segmented, and disassembled people without containing a process for restoring
their wholeness. Thus, the gaze tended to jeopardize the patient’s claim to authenticity”
(163). Here authenticity is about embracing or understanding a true, inner notion of self.
When subject to the gaze, a patient must question her ­self-understanding because she, in
consulting the doctor, believes the doctor knows something about her body that she cannot
discover. Armstrong and Shapiro demonstrate the many layers of submission by the living
patient before the gaze. Power over the body and the self, notions of identity and authen-
ticity, and any sense of personal understanding are relaxed before the doctor, if not given
over completely. This deconstruction of self, body, and unified sense of the body is, Shapiro
argues, damaging to such a degree that a patient may need to recover from the experience.
For the dead body, these concerns of authenticity, autonomy, and resistance fall flat.
Obviously, the cadaver does not have a conception of self, ­self-governance, or a unified
identity or authenticity. Rather than a patient submitting to the gaze, the cadaver is sub-
ject to the gaze and, just as crucially, unaware of it. From the perspective of the clinician,
there is no individual to separate from the body’s biological processes in order to uncover
the truth of the disease. Here I am strictly referring to an individual presented to the doc-
tor. This is done largely through patient discourse and interaction, which cannot occur in
the case of the corpse. I do not mean to imply that other people do not see the corpse as
an individual.2 What I mean instead is that Foucault was speaking about ­doctor-patient
interaction. Within that dynamic, without submission or resistance, the cadaver complies
with the gaze. This complicity, I submit, is the primary difference between the cadaver
and the living body in the context of the clinical gaze.
One might be inclined to argue that, in fact, the living patient shares this absence
of self while on the surgical table. Medical sociologist Deborah Lupton suggests that
“[i]n the doctor’s surgery the body is rendered an object to be prodded, tested, and exam-
ined. The owner is expected to give up his or her jurisdiction of the body over to the doc-
tor” (26). Lupton’s vivid description demonstrates how a body on the surgical table is
not unlike the cadaver, whose ­self-authenticity and bodily jurisdiction are lost while it is
prodded by the doctor. Both the cadaver and the surgical patient are unconscious to the
will, decisions, and gaze of the doctor. Thus, both cadaver and surgical patient are equally
subject to the effects of the clinical gaze on the body. Despite that basic similarity, one
need only consider how these two bodies are treated to acknowledge a difference, for the
doctor, between the living and the dead body.
Surgeon Atul Gawande, writing about the stark difference between touch in surgery
and autopsy, emphasizes that while surgeons are very careful to avoid touching the patient
unnecessarily, “in the dissecting room, where the person is gone and only the carcass
remains, you find little of this delicacy, and the difference is visible in the smallest details”
(2). Gawande contrasts moving the living body swiftly and delicately when transferring
a patient to a surgical table with moving the dead body roughly when transferring it to
the dissecting table. During autopsy, he notes, the body is “yanked,” and sections of the
body are lifted out of the carcass “as if it were the hood of a car” (3). In the autopsy room,
the body is clearly an object, whereas on the surgical table the surgeon is aware of, and
respectful toward, the health of the whole, living patient. The surgeon thus acknowledges
the subjectivity and authenticity of the living body even as his or her gaze undermines it.
The way to understand this distinction between the objectification of the
 The Living and Dead Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze (Barnett)  37

­n on-compliant cadaver and that of the compliant but unconscious surgical patient
is not through the gaze itself but through other forms of communication that support
the visual. When a living patient is submitted to the clinical gaze, he or she is essen-
tially reduced to the visual with one exception: the patient will give a medical history
or describe symptoms. The doctor then sifts through this information in order to know
where to direct the gaze or to find anecdotes that support what the gaze has revealed.
Although language is subsidiary to the gaze, it contributes to it. As Martin Jay argues in
his critique of Foucault, the clinical gaze is not purely optical: “But what is in fact ‘seen’
is not a given, objective reality open to an innocent eye. Rather, it is an epistemic field,
constructed as much linguistically as visually, which is no more or less close to the ‘truth’
than what it replicated” (182). The “constructed field” provides distance for the spectator
to become surveyor, but, more importantly, the field of distance is constructed through
language as well as through sight. It may be that the doctor rejects the patient’s words
based on what the gaze uncovers, but verbalization is the one way in which the patient
can shape the result of clinical looking.
This communication extends to the patient on the surgical table. While the patient
is not able to talk to the doctor, he or she may have spoken in advance of the surgery,
and these conversations can inform how the doctor proceeds.3 Additionally, the body of
the patient is communicating to the surgeon through vital signs such as heartbeat and
by bodily responses to the surgeon’s touch. Although the gaze interprets some of these
responses, they are interjections by the autonomous body of the patient, many of which
are beyond the surgeon’s control. Again, communication between patient (or, in this case,
patient’s body) and doctor informs the clinical gaze.
The cadaver, in contrast, does not speak to the doctor, nor does its body offer much
by way of communication. In an autopsy there may be some release of gases and occa-
sional bile or bleeding, but these secretions are not read by the person performing the
autopsy as a surgeon might read a patient’s bodily reactions during surgery. There are no
vital signs to inform and no concern that the patient needs to survive. Many of the signs
that the cadaver can give in an autopsy—like the cracking of ribs when being spread—do
not raise the same concerns for the doctor or medical student as they would in a living
patient. This is because the overall health of the cadaver is negligible.
In contrast to the autopsy of a cadaver, in surgery, the entire body of a living patient
must survive treatment. Furthermore, surgeons usually expect the patient’s overall health
to improve. With this intention in mind, the whole body is cared for even if only one
area requires surgery. An anesthetic is an excellent example of this ­whole-body care, for
it makes the body more comfortable and less likely to go into shock when undergoing
major surgery. Although the gaze remains in practice during surgery and is valuable for
identifying the need for surgery, once in surgery, the doctor must take into account the
whole patient even as the patient is unable to exercise autonomy. In contrast, the doctor
or student faced with a cadaver need not be concerned with keeping the whole patient
functioning. With no resistance to the clinical gaze, no means to submit to the gaze, and
no need for the clinician to take into account the whole in relation to its parts, the cadaver
is submissive to the gaze in a way no living patient could be.
Let us suppose that in its complicity with the gaze, the cadaver undermines the
supremacy and power of the gaze. Foucault was concerned with the gaze because of
the power it accorded physicians, but when confronting a corpse, there is no possi-
bility of resistance. Without resistance, can there be power? In the final chapter of the
38   The Body in Theory

introductory volume to The History of Sexuality, Foucault posits that “it is over life,
throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the
moment that escapes it” (138). In death, the body escapes certain kinds of power typically
afforded by the clinical gaze such as subjection or objectification.
An understanding of how it may be possible for the corpse to exist outside of power
can be found in the notion of the corpse as abject. Corporeal excess in death is outlined
in philosopher and semiotician Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject in Powers of Hor-
ror: An Essay on Abjection. Kristeva, drawing on Freud, describes the corpse as an ulti-
mate form of abjection in part due to decay—the literal destruction of one’s corporeal
boundaries. Kristeva describes abjection as that which blurs ontological boundaries, jar-
ring our sense of being because it challenges the limits that define the singular individual
(1–9). The corpse as abject object without autonomy resists the existing power structures,
including clinical looking, that it was subject to when alive.
Yet the corpse is not completely free of the power exerted by science. As Kristeva
points out, the corpse is only abject when “seen without God and outside of science”
(4). In the realm of science, the corpse is altered, and we see this alteration within the
clinic or hospital when the corpse becomes a cadaver. This nomic distinction signifies
the change of a dead body from an abject excess into an educational tool. As cadaver,
the clinic and its existing processes are able to use the dead body as a means to support
its existing authority. In order to demonstrate such an insertion of the corpse back into
existing power dynamics, one must establish the medical use of the cadaver as a founda-
tion of medical education.
The knowledge that underlies the clinical gaze—the knowledge of disease held by
the doctor or clinician—is largely developed by looking at cadavers. As historians such
as Ariès and Ruth Richardson have argued, since the nineteenth century, dissection has
been essential to medical education. Foucault considered the increased regard for dis-
section to be unnecessary, arguing that the historical importance of dissection was retro-
spectively created because it justified the power of the clinic and its work. His argument
is compelling as, to this day, the belief lingers that anatomical medicine requires learning
through dissections, and this belief bolsters clinical power.4
Dissection of a cadaver is the purview not solely of medical students but also of prac-
ticed doctors. As medical historian Chris Philo explains in his essay reframing The Birth
of the Clinic, “The new ­anatomo-clinical medicine duly depended to a large degree on
being able to cut open human cadavers, and on the doctors and pupils learning together”
(13). Philo emphasizes that both doctors and students gain knowledge from their experi-
ence with cadavers, demonstrating that medical knowledge continues to be informed by
cadavers even after medical school.
Armstrong, discussing the social body in relation to Foucault’s clinical gaze, sug-
gests that, without resistance, the gaze does not destroy but defines the body: “But what
if, following Foucault, there was no ordinary individuality, no autonomy, no discreet [sic]
body […]? Then, the process of corporal objectification becomes not a destructive assault
on human individuality but the very practice through which that individuality is given
a literally solid foundation and manifestation” (21–22). Although the corpse is a discrete
body, it has no individuality or autonomy, and thus Armstrong’s point is worth consider-
ing. If Armstrong is correct, the clinical gaze acting on the corpse is no longer objectify-
ing; it is creative, and it is creating knowledge and power. We can see this creation at work
through the educational practice of dissection.
 The Living and Dead Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze (Barnett)  39

The system by which the doctor is perpetually learning from the cadaver ensures
that the doctor’s clinical experience is underpinned by references to the cadaver rather
than to living patients. From the first days of practice, the doctor is able to treat and diag-
nose patients by referring to knowledge gained from looking at the cadaver. In this way,
the dead body is a perpetual reference for the clinical gaze. While the doctor is wield-
ing the gaze, he or she is taking apart the patient’s body, mimicking dissection in order to
identify the disease and its effects on the body. Even in identifying symptoms, the doctor
refers to knowledge gained from the cadaver. For example, when identifying a rash on the
skin of the patient, the doctor likely first learned about that rash when it was encountered
on a dead patient through either dissection or anatomical drawing.5 By supporting the
development of the clinical gaze, the cadaver is no longer an excess beyond the reach of
power. It becomes a means of contributing to the existing power of the clinical gaze and,
as a result, the authority of the doctor.
This knowledge is arguably considered as valuable as the living patient’s life. After
all, dissection of the dead can be used to treat patients in the future. Social theorist Niko-
las Rose, analyzing Foucault’s work as a reading of medical history, contends that the
death of the patient justifies the gaze that the doctor directed at the patient when alive.
As Rose explains, “Thus the signs recorded in the case history ceased to be merely ‘super-
ficial’ and statistical; immediate dissection of the corpses allowed the link between sign
and lesion to be solidified and deepened” (61). The gaze, working in death, continues to
diagnose the patient, but now it is for gaining knowledge rather than for easing suffering.
For the clinical gaze, the death of the patient changes little in terms of knowledge. In fact,
an argument can be made that once the disease is discovered, knowledge can be used to
save future lives, thus justifying the death of the initial patient through clinical looking.
This example eerily illustrates how the dead body informs as well as validates the clinical
gaze and the resulting power structure. By informing the clinical gaze and helping estab-
lish the authority of the doctor, knowledge gained from the cadaver contributes to the
power of the doctor.
Further, the specialist knowledge provided by the study of the corpse elevates the
doctor to the level of expert. Through dissection, the doctor gains essential knowledge
required for diagnosis and treatment of disease. This is in large part why, returning to
Shapiro’s argument above, a patient is willing to submit to the doctor: the doctor has spe-
cialist knowledge that allows him or her to alleviate the patient’s suffering. The corpse, as
source of specialist knowledge, underpins the power structure behind the clinical gaze
and encourages patients to submit to it.
By providing specialist knowledge, which shapes and justifies the gaze, the cadaver
contributes to the empowerment of the doctor. The doctor’s empowerment calls into
question the notion that death is beyond power, for the dead can be inserted into exist-
ing power structures. This point does not negate Foucault’s point in The History of Sexual-
ity that in death one can escape certain kinds of personal and political power. Instead, the
use of the cadaver in informing the clinical gaze serves as an example of what he termed
“biopower.” Biopower is, at its most basic, power over the body exerted by an established
system on a populace.6 One can see an example of biopower at work in the ­doctor–living
patient relationship. As I described above, the doctor exercises the clinical gaze as a tool
of power over the patient’s body, a gaze to which the patient usually submits. The author-
ity afforded the clinic allows for the management of large groups of people, acting as
what Foucault calls a “[d]isciplinary [i]nstitution” (Security, Territory, Population 55–86).
40   The Body in Theory

Individual patients, adhering to the institution’s power, regularly visit doctors and take
medication, submitting to the gaze and authority of the doctor. Looking at larger popula-
tions, the institutional power of the hospital allows for national and global vaccinations,
quarantines, and outbreak warnings.
Foucault focuses on biopower exerted on living populations, although he acknowl-
edges the influence of biopower on how the living manage and dispose of the dead. The
medical cadaver is an example of biopower extending to our bodies beyond our death.
The reclamation of the corpse as a site of medical investigation and education fits ideally
with the biopower model in which institutions use “techniques for achieving the subju-
gations of bodies and the control of populations” (History 140). In this case, however, the
population under control refers to both the dead and the living. This extension of bio-
power after death gives the clinic a degree of control over the body that the body’s former
inhabitant cannot exercise. With autonomy challenged by institutions in life, the exten-
sion of institutional power over the dead raises the eternal question: is our body truly
our own? Even if we exercise as much autonomy as possible in life, in death, the body is
beyond our control, at least to the degree that it is subjected to certain disciplinary pow-
ers like the clinic.
Further, through subsuming the dead body and converting it to knowledge, the
existing structure of the clinic is able to maintain its power over the living patient. With
the clinical gaze rooted in dissection and the cadaver, the gaze references and draws on
the dead body in order to examine and treat the living. The cadaver is thus both subject
to clinical power and contributor to the ­pre-existing power structure of the clinical gaze.
As science uses the dead to regulate the living, the patient becomes linked to the dead
because the healing of the living relies on knowledge of the corpse.
In considering the dead and living body in relation to the clinical gaze, my analy-
sis has offered a new perspective on power and objectification in the clinic. First, I have
pointed out that although Foucault only discusses the optics of the clinic, in reality the
visual power of the gaze is underpinned by other ­non-visual information. This is not a
new critique of Foucault, as demonstrated by Jay above. However, in the context of the
living and dead body of the clinic, the ­non-visual cues separate the inanimate cadaver
from the patient undergoing surgery. This separation suggests that even in the act of sub-
mitting to the gaze, the patient is always able to react against it and does so more than
Foucault’s text suggests.
Second, I have established that a distinct power dynamic exists between the dead
bodies and the clinic/doctor under the clinical gaze. Whereas the living patient submits
to the power or is subject to the power of the clinician because of the gaze, the cadaver
is used to shape and ensure the power of the clinician over the living patient. This vital
distinction, I hope, will open discussion into control over the dead body and the ways
in which the corpse is made useful rather than left in the realm of excess and the abject.
Earlier in this essay, I quoted Kristeva, who argued that within science the corpse is not
abject, and my argument affirms this belief. However, in science the corpse is used to
cement existing forms of power rather than to challenge the system or reach for the sub-
lime as in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. The role of the dead body in science should be open
to further consideration, as power over the corpse raises questions of our relationship
with our bodies and the extension of institutional power beyond life.
As far as the effect on clinical practice and patient care goes, the role of the cadaver is
underappreciated in determining how doctors understand disease and regard the patient.
 The Living and Dead Body in Foucault’s Clinical Gaze (Barnett)  41

Given the role of the cadaver in shaping the expertise of the doctor, what might this
dynamic offer the discussion of body donation? How might the foundational knowledge
of the corpse alter the perception of the living patient? Does this relationship estrange us
from death or bring us closer to it? Finally, in a world where death is increasingly med-
icalized, are we giving away our last chance of escaping systems of power? I hope this
analysis will be a launching point for such discussions, many of which are long overdue.

Notes
1. This distinction is discussed in the translator’s note to the 2012 version of The Birth of the Clinic.
2. Examples like the 2004 ­Alder-Hay case in England show that the confusion between the families viewing
a corpse as an individual and the doctors viewing the corpse as an object can have wider detrimental effects.
3. ­Pre-surgical discussions between doctor and patient can inform how the surgeon reads the body once he
is performing surgery. For example, if a patient informs the doctor of a heart condition, different anaesthetic
options and surgical techniques may be used to ensure the heart is not put through too much strain.
4. While arguments can be made that until recently the best way to approximate surgery was through the
use of a cadaver, the advent of computer models and ­robot-assisted surgery makes the continued use of dissec-
tion in medicine remarkable.
5. One might suggest that the doctor learned not from dissection but from anatomical drawing. In fact, it
is a mix of the two. It is worth noting, as Massey expertly explains, that the distinction between the artistic
gaze and the clinical gaze in anatomical drawing was problematic from the very beginning (68–69). Anatom-
ical drawings of the dead body and—even in the case of ­from-life drawings—of the truncated and dismem-
bered body divorced what is seen on the page from a notion of the whole living patient, a notion with origins
in the clinical gaze.
6. Foucault wrote of biopower on a national level, even in relation to health. The clinic fits within the
national conceptions of health in countries like the UK or Canada, which have a national health service. How-
ever, even in the U.S., which has a mixed private and public system, the medical community fits within an
established social hierarchy.

Works Cited
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by H. Weaver, Oxford University Press, 1981.
Armstrong, David. “Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge of Bodies.” Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and
the Body, edited by Colin Jones and Ray Porter, Routledge, 1995, pp. 17–27.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A.M. Sheridan, Routledge, 2012.
_____. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. Vol. 1, London, Penguin, 2008.
_____. Security, Territory, Population. Translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Lectures at
the Collège de France, 1977–1978.
Gawande, Atul. “Final Cut: Medical Arrogance and the Decline of the Autopsy.” The New Yorker, 2001, pp. 2–9.
Jay, Martin. “In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in ­Twentieth-Century French
Thought.” Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 175–204.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University
Press, 1982.
Lupton, Deborah. Medicine as Culture. 2nd ed., SAGE Productions, 2004.
Massey, Lyle. “Against the ‘Statue Anatomized’: The ‘Art’ of ­Eighteenth-Century Anatomy on Trial.” Art His-
tory, vol. 40, 1, 2016, pp. 68–103.
Philo, Chris. “The Birth of the Clinic: An Unknown Work of Medical Geography.” Area, vol. 32, 2000, pp.
11–19.
Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Penguin Books, 1988.
Rose, Nikolas. “Medicine, History and the Present.” Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body, Rout-
ledge, 1995.
Sappol, Michael. Dream Anatomy. Department of Health and Human Services, 2002.
Shapiro, Johanna. “(Re)examining the Clinical Gaze through the Prism of Literature.” Families, Systems &
Health, vol. 20, 2002, pp. 161–70.
Tercier, John Anthony. The Contemporary Deathbed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
 Is the Autistic Body a Body
Without Organs?
Leon S. Brenner

The “body without organs” (BwO) is a core concept in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s philosophical corpus. It was originally adopted by Deleuze in his The Logic of
Sense and further developed, together with Guattari, in their ­Anti-Oedipus and A Thou-
sand Plateaus. The term “body without organs” was originally coined by French play-
wright, poet, and schizophrenic patient Antonin Artaud. In his play To Have Done with
the Judgment of God, Artaud writes the following: “When you will have made him a body
without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and
restored him to his true freedom” (571). Deleuze and Guattari adopt this “emancipatory”
principle from Artaud, finalizing its adaptation in a chapter in A Thousand Plateaus enti-
tled “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs”—the main text discussed in
this essay.
Briefly stated, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the vital potentialities of the human
body are habitually limited by the forces that shape dominant reality. They claim that we
all are confined to a set of attributes, potentials, and potencies that determine our bod-
ies’ internal modes of functioning. The BwO is a notion that designates the horizon of
the vital potentialities of the body prior to its normalized destination. To make your-
self a body without organs is to actively experiment with these potentialities and limita-
tions, aiming at a different configuration of the most intimate and internal attributes of
the body (­Anti-Oedipus 309).
It is commonly accepted that Deleuze’s work in the 1960s conveyed a certain attrac-
tion to and appreciation of psychoanalysis and especially to the teaching of Jacques Lacan
(Nedoh 44). Nevertheless, with the publication of ­Anti-Oedipus in 1972, Deleuze and
Guattari mark a clear break with psychoanalysis, leading to the publication of A Thou-
sand Plateaus in 1980. In these two books, Deleuze and Guattari define the BwO in direct
opposition to “Lacan and his school,” developing several conflicting theses concerning
desire, satisfaction, and jouissance (Deleuze, The Logic 358). Deleuze and Guattari man-
age to identify several crucial features of the ­above-mentioned Lacanian notions and
argue that they are rejected in the BwO as it manifests in masochism, schizophrenia, and
other ­so-called pathologies. In doing so, Deleuze and Guattari provide these pathologi-
cal categories with a new designation and critically ­re-examine them. Therefore, one can
see that, in their opposition to Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari find the fer-
tile ground that inspires their ruminations on the BwO—a major notion internal to the

42
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  43

framework of their “Schizoanalysis.” This essay provides an original ­re-examination of

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO from the perspective of contemporary psycho-
analytic theory. More precisely, it aims to revitalize the relationship between Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy and Lacan’s psychoanalysis by suggesting (1) that the contemporary
Lacanian clinic of autism provides viable theoretical and clinical grounds for the devel-
opment and practical implementation of the notion of the BwO and (2) that Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of the BwO can be useful in the development of psychoanalytic the-
ory and technique as they are implemented today in the clinic of autism. Accordingly,
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO will be developed using terms borrowed from
Lacanian psychoanalysis and associated with three modalities of autistic embodiment
elaborated in the contemporary Lacanian clinic.

The Body Without Organs

In “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs,” Deleuze and Guattari pro-
vide a comprehensive account of the practical measures that are to be taken in order
to make yourself a BwO. The notion of the BwO is presented in this essay as a “regu-
latory principle” in the sense that it conditions the aforementioned practical measures
while remaining an unattainable goal (TP 150). The following section will illustrate how
abiding by the regulatory principle of the BwO entails three things: (1) dismantling the
normalizing factors that predetermine the functioning of the body; (2) doing so with
prudence by following a specific mode of experimentation; and (3) pursuing the affirma-
tion of a unique form of immanent and consistent desire.

Destratification
One of the crucial measures to be taken in order to make yourself a BwO is disman-
tling the normalizing factors that predetermine the functioning of the body. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that this form of resistance—called “destratification”—is to be achieved
on three fundamental levels of corporeal normalization called “strata”: the strata of the
“organism,” “signifiance,” and “subjectification” (151).
Destratification is to be achieved first of all on the level of the “organism.” For
Deleuze and Guattari, the stratum of the organism does not stand for the specific
organic dimension of the body but designates the regulated, organized, and central-
ized mode of its normalized functioning (45). In other words, the organism stands for
whatever holds together the originally fragmented organs of the body under a predeter-
mined, unified, and regulated order that restricts their functioning. Therefore, in order
to make yourself a BwO, you have to dismantle this “organization of the organs called
organism” (158). Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that destratification on the level of the
organism does not empty the body of all of its organs but turns it into “an assemblage
of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organization that makes
it an organism” (Holland 94). This form of bodily ­dis-organization enables its organs
to function “independent of accessory forms,” thus defying their organismic determina-
tion (TP 153). Devoid of their organismic determination, the organs of the BwO open it
to new potentialities such as to “walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through
your skin, breathe with your belly” instead of “seeing with your eyes, breathing with
44   The Body in Theory

your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue,” for example (150–
51).
Destratification is also to be achieved on the level of “signifiance.” With the stratum
of signifiance, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the symbolic or meaningful determination
of the body—in other words, to the fact that the world and the body that inhabits it are
experienced as meaningful. More specifically, they refer to Lacan’s notion of the “sym-
bolic order” and its fundamental role in the organization of the functioning of the body
(159).
In order to get a better picture of the destratification on the level of signifiance, let
us first examine the relationship between the symbolic order and the body in Lacan’s
psychoanalysis. Already in his earliest writings, Freud had been adamant that language
and the body are intertwined. Lacan developed this notion when he argued that human
embodiment is a secondary phenomenon: in other words that the body, in its experien-
tial form, is a symbolic construct and not a primary given. For Lacan, it is language that is
a primary body whose materiality is composed of signifiers (Écrits 248). It is through the
functioning of these signifiers that the body is divided into organs. This notion is valid for
all of the organs of the body that can be said to be “isolated in corporeal reality,” as long
as they are spoken about—inserted into discourse (Lacan, “L’étourdit” 50). Therefore, it
is only after one has been inserted into the body of signifiers that organs like the heart or
liver, for example, can be localized in the body. In other words, it is only after “an organ
makes itself the signifier” that we are given a body we can call our own (50).1
According to Lacan, before its symbolic determination, the human body is frag-
mented into unorganized and indiscernible stimuli and sensations. He argues that it is
only after the identification with the symbolic inscription of the unified ­body-image
(ideal ego) in the mirror stage that the fragmented body gains its organized mode of
functioning (Écrits 75–81). Upon identification with the unified ­body-image, the eroto-
genic zones are signified and thus engender the erotogenic organs. These are the oral,
anal, and genital organs and their corresponding objects discussed by Freud in his
account of infantile sexuality (“The Economic Problem” 165). Lacan argues that the ero-
togenic organs are marked on the body by constitutive “cuts” applied in its first encounter
with the signifier. These cuts involve a submission of a “pound of flesh” that “falls away”
from the body and is inserted into the signifying dialectic (Seminar X 124, 167). In other
words, it involves “yielding” a sum of bodily stimuli (jouissance) and allowing its local-
ization outside of the body in the Other (AV 90).2 This ­two-fold inscription, on the body
and in the Other, provides the erotogenic organs with their crucial role in the intersec-
tion between the body and language (Écrits 579). Lacan defines the unified ­body-image
as a primal symbolic “montage” of the erotogenic organs that determines the exact way
in which one “enjoys” libidinally and, as a result, the ways through which desire unfolds
in relation to its objects (Seminar I 176). For the sake of the discussion in this essay, the
dynamic accumulation of these organs will be called the erotogenic body.
Now that we have accounted for the relationship between the symbolic order and
the body in Lacan’s psychoanalysis, we can better contextualize Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of destratification on the level of “signifiance.” We see that—in terms borrowed
from Lacan—this form of destratification entails the refusal of symbolic mediation in all
matters that have to do with the body. More specifically, it dictates dismantling the uni-
fied ­body-image, going back to a state of bodily fragmentation and libidinal disorganiza-
tion. This entails dismantling the “montage” of the erotogenic body by refusing to yield
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  45

the jouissance of the erotogenic organs to the Other. Deleuze and Guattari argue that by
entering this fragmented and ­non-mediated corporeal state, you can try to construct a
BwO using ­non-symbolic means without relying on the normalized functioning of the
body.
Finally, destratification is also to be achieved on the level of “subjectification.” With
the stratum of subjectification, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the unified notion of the
self (­ego-ideal in psychoanalysis). Put simply, with the term “subject,” they associate the
“historical, social, or individual person, and [his or her] corresponding feelings,” acts,
and recollections (TP 162).3 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the self is the focal point
from which the body materializes in “dominant reality” (160). Accordingly, destratifica-
tion on the level of subjectification entails abandoning the self as an organizing factor in
the determination of the body. By doing so one allows a broader mode of functioning in
which a variance of intensities can pass through the body or circulate around it without
functioning as a personal extension of the self. According to Lacan, in the mirror stage,
the unified ­body-image (ideal ego) is set in place, making way for identification with the
unified self (­ego-ideal)—both of which are prototypical psychic components that consti-
tute the Freudian ego (Écrits 75–81). In this sense, destratification on the level of subjec-
tification entails both the rejection of the ideal ego and the ­ego-ideal and, therefore, the
ego as a whole. Correspondingly, Deleuze and Guattari stress that the BwO is devoid of
an ego as it is not based on any distinction between an inside and an outside: “[I]t is like
the absolute Outside that knows no Selves,” where the self and the other know no bound-
ary (TP 156).

Prudent Experimentation
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that destratification should be undertaken with
prudence, for in the process of making yourself a BwO, many errors can occur, errors
that could lead to a total “emptying” of the body, “slipping away,” “illusion,” “hallucina-
tion,” “psychic death,” and even actual death (149, 150, 160–162). Deleuze and Guattari
explicitly warn that “a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immedi-
ately into a body of nothingness, pure ­self-destruction whose only outcome is death” or
“catastrophe” (161–162). Accordingly, a major concern in making yourself a BwO is to
avoid emptying the body completely (158). This precaution dictates keeping “enough of
the organism” as well as “small supplies of signifiance and subjectification,” not “wildly
destratifying” but looking for a point where these strata can be carefully dismantled and
not radically negated (161).
Deleuze and Guattari mention several modalities of the ­s elf-destructive BwO.
Among these modalities are the hypochondriac body (or ­sucked-dry body), the paranoid
body, the schizo body (or catatonicized body), the drugged body (or vitrified body), and
the masochist body (or ­sewn-up body) (150). All of these are defined by Deleuze and
Guattari as modalities of the “empty BwO,” that is, BwOs that have been “botched” in the
process of their becoming—radically emptied instead of filled (152).

Immanent and Consistent Desire

Other than destratifying—and doing so with prudence—Deleuze and Guattari pro-
vide their regulative principle with affirmative rather than negative coordinates. These
46   The Body in Theory

coordinates are set according to what they define as “the field of immanence of desire”
or “the plane of consistency specific to desire” (154). Deleuze and Guattari develop this
unique notion of immanent and consistent desire in direct opposition to Lacan’s psycho-
analysis. First, according to Lacan, desire is necessarily preceded and conditioned by the
lack that marks out the place of the object cause of desire (objet petit a). In contrast,
Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent and consistent desire does not spring out of lack. More
precisely, it “lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent
criterion” (157). Second, according to Lacan, desire is regulated by the pleasure principle,
which keeps it endlessly seeking to obtain an unobtainable object. In contrast, Deleuze
and Guattari’s immanent and consistent desire is devoid of any external reference point
(154). It is a purely autarchic desire in itself and for itself. It has no object or law. Its only
object and law are itself (Nedoh 44–45). Finally, Lacan situates what he calls “jouissance”
beyond desire and the pleasure principle as the opposite pole of desire, as a positivity,
a bodily sensation that goes beyond the pleasure principle (Braunstein 104). In direct
opposition to Lacan’s clear distinction between desire and jouissance, Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s immanent and consistent desire does not oppose jouissance but inherently embod-
ies and distributes its intensities in the body (TP 154–155).
Springing out of lack, conditioned by the object cause of desire, regulated by the
pleasure principle, and opposing jouissance: these are all characteristics of desire that
Lacan associates with the effects of the symbolic on the body. Accordingly, with their
definition of immanent and consistent desire, Deleuze and Guattari protest Lacan’s psy-
choanalysis in as much as it bestows a central role on the symbolic order in the facil-
itation of the dynamism of the body. Through their account of destratification and
immanent and consistent desire, they provide guidelines for an experimental practice
that would be attractive to those who wish to say “No!” to the symbolic and yet remain
in a living body. Deleuze and Guattari’s meticulous attempt to articulate such an experi-
mental practice will prove useful in the next section, in which three unique modalities of
autistic embodiment will be discussed.

The Autistic Body Without Organs

At the time of the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, the psychoanalytic clinic rec-
ognized three major clinical categories for human subjectivity: neurosis, perversion, and
psychosis. In their chapter on the BwO, Deleuze and Guattari choose two ­sub-categories
belonging to these major clinical categories and associate them with the BwO: the schizo-
phrenic body (a ­sub-category of psychosis) and the masochistic body (a ­sub-category of
perversion). In the Lacanian corpus, neither of these clinical categories entails an active
and complete break from the symbolic order on behalf of the subject, but both are char-
acterized by certain setbacks in the mode of access to the domain of signifiers, be it lim-
ited or diminished (Seminar III 120). According to Freud and Lacan, both psychotic and
perverse symptoms convey an attempt to treat two distinct forms of symbolic disinte-
gration: the masochist, by bringing his partner to forcefully prop up an articulation of
the symbolic law (in the form of a command) through which a limit can be imposed on
jouissance (Fink 165) and the schizophrenic, through the delusional articulation of an
organizing principle that aims to mend the “hole in the symbolic” and keep the Oth-
er’s persecutory jouissance at bay (Lacan, Seminar III 156). Accordingly, it seems that
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  47

Deleuze and Guattari base their theory of the masochistic and schizophrenic BwO on a
critical misreading of Lacan’s notion of perversion and psychosis (Nedoh 48). They prin-
cipally argue that, while neurotics depend on symbolic mediation (the Other), perverts
and psychotics can succeed in “annulling” the Other, thus gaining a position “beyond the
Other”—an “absolute Outside” of symbolic authority (Deleuze, “The Logic” 319; TP 156).4
Taking this misreading into account, the following section develops the hypothesis that
it is not the psychotic and perverse structures that provide the proper clinical support for
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO but the autistic structure.
In the last few decades, several scholars in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis have
developed the notion that autism should be defined as a singular clinical category for
human subjectivity (Lefort; AV; BA; Brenner). Among their many perspectives, most of
these scholars agree that one of the crucial structural characteristics that distinguishes
autistic subjectivity is a radical refusal of any recourse to the symbolic order. Without
recourse to the symbolic order, autistics testify to experiencing their bodies as a frag-
mented, unorganized, and indiscernible mass of stimuli and sensations. This is a body in
which the erotogenic organs are not marked by the signifier—a body with no borders, no
inside or outside, where all orifices are blocked, and jouissance is experienced as a brutal
invasion and even mutilation. In direct reference to these autistic testimonies, Éric Lau-
rent anecdotally suggests that “the autistic body is the true ‘body without organs’” (BA
23). More specifically, he argues that this “pathological” dimension of autistic embodi-
ment can be said to resemble a body that lacks all erotogenic organs. The following sec-
tion of this essay will attempt to augment Laurent’s suggestion by demonstrating that
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO can truly be fruitful in explicating three—
and not one—distinct modalities in the relationship that autistics form with their bod-
ies. The first modality, which might be called pathological, will correspond with Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of the “empty” BwO and the second and third modalities with the
notion of the “full” BwO. Finally, the last section of this essay will suggest that the expli-
cation of the notion of the BwO in the context of autistic subjectivity can be useful for the
development of a unique practical perspective to be adopted in the facilitative work done
with autistics in the Lacanian psychoanalytic clinic.

The Empty Autistic BwO

As was elaborated in the previous section, the constitution of the erotogenic body
entails “yielding” a sum of bodily stimuli (jouissance) and allowing its symbolic media-
tion (AV 90). ­Jean-Claude Maleval argues that the yielding of this original sum of jouis-
sance is experienced by autistic infants as being extremely distressing—as a mutilation
(80). Accordingly, he stresses that one of the most defining characteristics of autism is the
radical “refusal” to yield the jouissance of the erotogenic organs to symbolic mediation
(99). Maleval defines this refusal in terms of the “retention” of the erotogenic object (37–
38)5—or, in other words, as an active refusal to constitute the Other, the symbolic order
as the locus of signifiers, as a place in which the erotogenic object is to be inscribed.
The retention of the erotogenic object severely hinders the relationship between the
subject and language. More specifically, due to its crucial role in the intersection between
the subject and the Other, the retention of the erotogenic object causes a radical break
from the locus of the Other. It prevents autistics from having any recourse to signifiers
and thus leaves them with no access to the symbolic mediation of jouissance (81). This
48   The Body in Theory

failure to secure symbolic mediation brings many scholars to argue that, in autism, “there
is no Other” (Lefort 14; AV 82; BA 29). Rosine Lefort and Robert Lefort, who are consid-
ered the ones to have inaugurated this formula, provide several formulations for this psy-
choanalytic notion. One of the most poignant formulations is worth quoting at length:
“The fundamental etiological point of this [autistic] structure is that there is no Other for
it. In the transference, I am there and I do not exist as the Other, whether it is the Other of
the image, the Other of the signifier, or the Other that is the bearer of the object” (Lefort
14). In this compelling excerpt, the Leforts assert that the Other does not exist for autis-
tics in three different modalities. They claim that, in autism, there is no Other of the
image, that is, the Other as the locus in which the unified ­body-image is inscribed in the
mirror stage and enables the further identification with the ­ego-ideal (Lacan, Seminar I
125; Écrits 75–81).6 The Leforts add that, in autism, there is no Other of the signifier, that
is, the Other as the domain of language and the Other as the intersubjective domain of
human culture (Chiesa 35). This is evident from a very early age in the absence or pov-
erty of babbling (AV 81, 89–90) as well as in the absence of verbal appeals to their care-
takers to pacify their needs (97–99). Moreover, it manifests in autistic detachment from
the cultural laws and norms that govern intersubjective reality, causing them great diffi-
culty in creating social bonds and leaving them in a state of extreme isolation (96, 105,
216; Maleval, “Extension” 772; BA 75). Finally, the Leforts maintain that, in autism, there
is no Other that is the bearer of the object, that is, the Other in relation to which the ero-
togenic object can be inscribed. On this level, the autistic refusal to yield jouissance to the
Other is associated by the Leforts with a setback in the symbolic inscription of the eroto-
genic organs (AV 82–84).
This setback renders the autistic body as a body that is “cleansed of all possible
organs of exchange” (BA 43). The lack of symbolic mediation of the erotogenic organs
causes a radical shift in the functioning of the erotogenic body. First, without symbolic
mediation, there is no organized regulation of jouissance in the body. In this case, the
drive circuit loses its aim and is thrust into an “aimless” and chaotic movement inside
and outside of the body (Brenner). Second, without symbolic mediation, the dimension
of lack cannot be inscribed in the body, thus causing the autistic body to be rendered as
a body “without holes,” in the sense that all the erotogenic organs are “plugged.” With
no point of entry and exit, the erotogenic body loses its functionality (BA 13, 42).7 Third,
the refusal to yield jouissance to the Other does not truly absolve the autistic from deal-
ing with the unbearable anxiety it provokes. On the contrary, without symbolic media-
tion, most manifestations of jouissance are experienced as intolerable intrusions in what
Lacan defines as the register of the real (Lefort 16).8 Correspondingly, Laurent argues that
the autistic body is characterized by a unique topology that has no distinction between
an inside and an outside, and thus the body’s interior and exterior are continuous. This
is a body that has no boundary enabling a distinction to be made between the self and
other objects (BA 78; Burgoyne 192). It is a body that suffers from the constant threat of
a brutal intrusion of a menacing jouissance that autistics associate with the experience
of the “void in the real,” the “black hole,” or the “pure presence of death” (BA 84). When
faced with these intrusions, autistics alternate between the two extreme existential poles
of destruction and ­self-destruction, which is to say that either the world or the subject
itself is at risk of being destroyed by an all engulfing limitless void (Lefort 15).
Taking the above into consideration, one can see why the autistic body, especially
when it is understood in terms of the erotogenic body, can be defined as a BwO. First, the
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  49

autistic body does not abide by what Deleuze and Guattari define as the stratum of the
organism, for it betrays any form of organized functioning: it lacks a unified ­body-image
and is characterized by an aimless and chaotic movement of jouissance inside and out-
side of the body. Second, the autistic body is conditioned by the radical rejection of what
Deleuze and Guattari define as the stratum of signifiance, for its functioning is radically
divorced from the dimension of the signifier: it draws nothing from the locus of the sym-
bolic order, neither in the sense of language as a mediator of jouissance nor in the sense
of the cultural dimension of the laws and norms that govern the use of the body in inter-
subjective reality. Because of its rejection of symbolic organization, the autistic body is
truly chaotic, lawless, a body with which you could “walk on your head, sing with your
sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly” (TP 151). Third, the autistic body
is not determined by what Deleuze and Guattari define as the stratum of subjectifica-
tion. As was already explained, without symbolic mediation, identification with the uni-
fied ­body-image (ideal ego) and the self (­ego-ideal) is radically hindered. Without these
focal points from which “dominant reality” can be organized, the capacity to associate
the autistic body with a historical, social, or individual self, with corresponding feelings,
acts, and recollections, is radically hindered as well (160, 162). Accordingly, the autis-
tic body is a body that is not organized on the basis of the distinction between the self
and the object. It recognizes no distinction between interior and exterior; it is an “abso-
lute Outside that knows no Selves,” where interior and exterior are continuous (156; BA
78).
The strata of the organism, signifiance, and subjectification are all radically rejected
in the construction of the autistic body. However, their rejection is not necessarily
accompanied by the affirmation of an immanent and consistent autistic desire but can
lead autistics to an unbearable and destructive corporeal state. The destructive modal-
ity of autistic embodiment can be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the empty
BwO. In other words, it can be defined as one of the modalities of the BwO that have
been botched in the process of their becoming and were radically emptied instead of
filled, leaving the body in a state of catastrophe (150, 152, 160–161). However, this is not
the only mode of autistic embodiment. For among autistic subjects we often find more
dynamic and lively modes of embodiment that evade catastrophe. In the next section of
this essay, these modes of autistic embodiment will be associated with Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s notion of the full BwO.

The Full Autistic BwO

Many testimonies of autistic individuals attest to their being confined to an empty
BwO. This empty autistic BwO originates in a radical rejection of the symbolic order in
all of its structuring dimensions, or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “wild destrati-
fication” on the strata of organism, signifiance, and subjectification (158–160). However,
there are many autistic individuals who do manage to construct a BwO without suc-
cumbing to the desolation of the empty body (150). Instead of carving out the organs of
their body through the use of signifiers, they resort to the use of a unique type of object
in the construction of supplementary organs. The following two ­sub-sections will present
the way in which these unique “autistic objects” (Tustin 60–68) function as the building
blocks of the full autistic BwO.
50   The Body in Theory

The Protective ­Rim-Body

In her book, Autism and Child Psychosis, Frances Tustin introduces the notion of the
“autistic object” (60–68). In her work with autistic patients, Tustin focuses on a certain
relationship of attachment between her patients and the objects they select, noting how
they surround themselves with hard objects with which they feel equated. She empha-
sizes the way autistics stick objects on their bodies, scarcely using them for their objective
functions (115). She argues that they conceive of them as parts of their body and thus gain
a sense of ­self-sufficiency that protects them from the anxiety provoked by their encoun-
ters with the precarious outside world. Hans Asperger also emphasizes the indispensable
character of autistic objects. He notes that, while these objects are arbitrary in form and
function, they act as an inseparable part of the child that, when taken away, causes the
child to feel as if they have been ripped from the body (81).
Following Tustin, Laurent and Maleval develop a framework that attests to the facili-
tative nature of autistic objects in the construction of the autistic body. In agreement with
Tustin, they note that one of the initial uses of such objects is the construction of a bodily
“shield” serving as a protection from unpredictable invasions of unbridled jouissance
(AV 105–106). Maleval states that, with recourse to the autistic object, “the autistic subject
situates the jouissance of the drive in an object outside of the body” (“Extension” 772). In
this way, the subject “creates a cut in the mode of jouissance” and establishes on the body
“a rim between the body and the outside world” (Maleval, “Langue” 80). The autistic sub-
ject thus infuses the object with unique vital properties that create a certain separation
from jouissance, which previously invaded the body (Maleval, “Extension” 770).
While Maleval argues that the autistic object mimics something of the functional-
ity of the Lacanian objet petit a, it is important to note that its implementations are not
identical to the ones accomplished in the symbolic inscription of the latter (AV 170). In
the case of objet petit a, such a procedure would involve a subtraction of a sum of jouis-
sance from the body that would then be inscribed in the symbolic. Due to the subject’s
refusal to inscribe the object of jouissance in the symbolic, the autistic object is not sep-
arated from the body and inscribed in the Other but remains attached to the body as
a supplementary “rim.” In this sense, Maleval and Laurent define this inscription as a
“body event” in which jouissance “returns on the rim” and demarcates the confines of the
body (AV 97, 106, 145; “Extension” 765; BA 66–70). The autistic body, in its sole manifes-
tation as a protective “rim of jouissance,” will be classified in this essay as the protective
­rim-body (BA 65).9
When autistic objects are adopted and inserted into the ­rim-body, they function as
“supplementary organs” that fill up the ­emptied-out body of language (Laurent, “Lecture”
138). According to Laurent, they “add on an organ precisely where language has not man-
aged to form an organ” (“Réflexions” 43). These supplementary organs put an end to the
anguish and desolation of the empty autistic BwO, enable a “delimitation” of jouissance,
and lead to a unique mode of activation and mastery of the supplementary ­rim-body
(Brenner).
This ­rim-body, also called the “protective rim” (Maleval, “Nourrir” 62), has been
defined by Tustin as a pathological “­auto-generated shell,” functioning as an armor that
completely blocks off the autistic from the external world (44). However, Maleval insists
that the ­rim-body does not strictly function as a “shell” but also as a “boundary” (64).
Thus, it not only protects autistics from invasions of jouissance but also provides the
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  51

means for a certain mediation of internal and external stimuli, evoking in the subject a
fascination with the dynamic function of objects as a means to acquire mastery over the
world (AV 129; Maleval, “Extension” 771). In its early stages, this fascination manifests
itself in the acquisition of knowledge about different bodily sensations and the predict-
ability of the interaction between objects.10 In later stages, this knowledge can culminate
in the development of a variety of specific interests that materialize in the laborious culti-
vation of information and a passion for mastery in specific fields of expertise.

The ­Dynamic-Rim-Body
Following the construction of the protective ­rim-body, many autistic individu-
als develop a subjective affinity with and general curiosity in regard to the more com-
plex dynamic functions of the autistic object (Maleval, “Extension” 772–774). In these
cases, they sometimes seek to further the development of autistic objects from their sim-
ple “protective” ­rim-like function to their more complex “dynamic” function in the con-
struction of what will be classified in this ­sub-section as the ­dynamic-rim-body.
The ­dynamic-rim-body is a more complex and versatile modality of the protec-
tive ­rim-body. First, in contrast to the passive adoptions of objects contingently encoun-
tered in the child’s surroundings in the construction of the ­rim-body, it involves an active
investment in the election of the objects constructing it. Second, it is open to change,
for its characteristics develop over time, and its functionality can be adapted to differ-
ent contexts and voluntarily used in different situations. Therefore, it seems that the
­dynamic-rim-body provides autistics with the most profound means for becoming inde-
pendent in a dynamic world (Maleval, “Extension” 772).
The ­dynamic-rim-body can be compared to a complex assemblage of autistic objects
that combines their localized dynamic functions and enables more intricate treatments of
jouissance in more complex circumstances. In the ­dynamic-rim-body, different arrange-
ments of objects function like fabricated “machines,” utilized for the exploration and
manipulation of the world. The combined utilization of these dynamic machines enables
autistics to achieve intricate goals, providing a more complex mode of access to the out-
side world and a level of subjective animation that is “livelier” than the one provided by
the ­rim-body. Its goal is to provide a ­long-lasting supplement for the regulation of jou-
issance (AV 164–166). Accordingly, Maleval defines it as a “jouissance regulator” and a
“libido sensor” (154).
While the ­r im-body is composed of independent supplementary organs, the
­dynamic-rim-body is a more complex apparatus that can be said to function as a supple-
mentary body. It provides a supplementary consistency to the image of the body, unify-
ing the functioning of the supplementary organs under a unique logic fabricated by the
autistic subject. Autistics can plug in and out of it like an auxiliary mechanical contrap-
tion, assimilating its dynamic properties when they specifically need them (AV 170). In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the capacity of “abstract machines”
to fabricate and manage the BwO. These abstract machines, composed of organs that
are ­re-appropriated from the organism, form “assemblages capable of plugging into
desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of assuring their continuous connections
and transversal ­tie-ins” (166). Correspondingly, in the case of the ­dynamic-rim-body, the
supplementary ­organ-machines function in such a way as to provide access to a unique
mode of bodily functioning open to exploration and invention (Smith 107). One of the
52   The Body in Theory

most ­well-known examples for the construction of the ­dynamic-rim-body as an auxil-

iary machine body can be found in Bruno Bettelheim’s account of the case of Joey the
“mechanical boy” in his book The Empty Fortress and his paper “Joey, a ‘mechanical boy.’”
Joey is an autistic child, treated by Bettelheim, who builds a ­made-up machine out of dif-
ferent objects he collects from his surroundings. What is so intriguing about Joey’s case
is the fact that he explicitly refers to his body as an auxiliary machine, which regulates
the electrical currents going through it. Bettelheim notes that, in order to eat, Joey has to
plug into an electric circuit; in order to drink, Joey has to come into contact with a com-
plicated piping system built with straws. Later on, a machine made out of light bulbs
assists Joey in controlling his bowel movements. Bettelheim describes a successive elec-
tion of objects that allows Joey to develop other secondary skills such as speaking and
regulating emotions. It even allows him to gain superior engineering skills that help him
lead an independent life through a career in electrical engineering.11
Taking all of the above into consideration, we can see why the ­dynamic-rim-body
can be considered an exceptional manifestation of Deleuze and Guattari’s full BwO. It
entails destratification on the level of organism as it is dependent not on a predetermined
organized functioning of the body but on the active invention of organizing principles
based on contingent encounters with the outside world. It entails destratification on the
level of signifiance as it is constructed neither through the use of signifiers nor via the
Other. It entails destratification on the level of subjectification as it is rooted not in iden-
tification with the prototypical renditions of the ego (ideal ego and ­ego-ideal) but in a
transitivistic equation with exterior objects. Finally, it enables a unique mode of satisfac-
tion that involves autogenerated bodily sensations and a fascination with specific fields
of knowledge and their development into specific interests. This unique mode of satis-
faction can be said to be homologous to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of immanent and
consistent desire, for it does not spring out of lack, it is not conditioned by a transcendent
criterion such as the pleasure principle, it is able to distribute intensities of jouissance in
the body, and it is purely autarchic in itself and for itself—in short, autistic. This mode
of prudent destratification, conditioned by an immanent and consistent mode of autis-
tic satisfaction, is posed as a “true” manifestation of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the
full BwO.

The Lacanian Clinic of the Autistic BwO

Lacan was quite adamant in his objection to the application of psychoanalysis in
adjacent intellectual scholarly fields. According to Lacan, “Psychoanalysis is applied,
strictly speaking, only as a treatment and thus to a subject who speaks and hears” (Écrits
630). Nevertheless, Lacan insisted that there are indeed things that psychoanalysis, as
an applied practice, can learn from other scholarly fields, a contention that is clearly
employed by Lacan in his many seminars, which revolve around intricate theoreti-
cal ideas adopted from the field of literature, art, and philosophy. Accordingly, the last
section of this essay will briefly elaborate on the contribution of Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of the BwO to the Lacanian clinic of autism.
The contemporary Lacanian approach to autism is primarily attributed to the work
of Rosine and Robert Lefort. Beginning their concentrated work with autistic subjects in
1969, in their newly founded Experimental School of ­Bonneuil-Sur-Marne, the Leforts
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  53

assembled a body of knowledge that inspired many future Lacanian psychoanalysts to

develop the clinic of autism independently from that of neurosis and psychosis. Among
these psychoanalysts are those discussed in this essay. Although today there is no sin-
gle predominant clinical approach to autism in the Lacanian field, much work is done
with autistics in order to reduce their suffering and to facilitate their unique mode of
existence. In its rendition based on the framework developed in this essay, the Lacanian
clinic of autism would revolve around the facilitation and support of autistics in the con-
struction of the ­rim-body leading to the construction of the ­dynamic-rim-body. As was
elaborated in the previous sections, this process entails supporting the selective adop-
tion of autistic objects, facilitating the use of these objects in the mediation of jouissance,
encouraging and nurturing the development of a unique form of satisfaction originating
in the use of these objects, and directing the development of an affinity for selected skills
that could enable a voluntary incorporation into the social bond. In this way, the Laca-
nian clinic of autism problematizes the very notion of a “cure” for autism. It ­re-orients
the clinic of autism toward supporting individuals in being autistic and not “curing”
them of the autism they have.12 In agreement with this orientation, clinicians who assist
autistic individuals in the construction of the ­dynamic-rim-body accept the singular use
their patients make of objects via their bodies as the gateway to the facilitation of their
subjective progress. This is why the Lacanian clinic of autism runs counter to clinical
approaches, such as Jon Bailey’s Applied Behavioral Analysis, that aim to condition and
normalize the way autistic individuals behave toward and approach their bodies.13 It dic-
tates that clinicians (1) acknowledge the capacity of autistics to voluntarily utilize their
objects in the facilitation of their suffering, (2) be attentive to their inventiveness, and (3)
understand that therapeutic progress entails the adoption of singular solutions sponta-
neously developed by each autistic individual. Most of all, it goes against the notion that
the human body should always function in normalized ways. It encourages autistic indi-
viduals to actively experiment with the potentialities and limitations of their bodies, thus
aiming at a different configuration of the body’s most intimate and internal modes of
functioning.
In summary, this essay suggests that the Lacanian clinic of autism provides Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of the BwO with a theoretical framework that has comprehensive
clinical implementations. Under this framework, the notion of the BwO becomes fruit-
ful in the explication of the exact relationship that autistics form with their bodies. Cor-
respondingly, this essay proposes that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO provides
a clear regulative principle according to which the clinic of autism can be developed: a
clinic that aims to help those who wish to say “No!” to the symbolic and yet remain in a
living body, those who wish to make themselves a BwO—a full one instead of a radically
emptied one. Finally, it indicates that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of immanent and
consistent desire sheds light on the unique mode of autistic satisfaction that material-
izes with the construction of the ­dynamic-rim-body. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of the BwO might be considered ahead of its time, that is, ahead of the develop-
ment of the Lacanian clinic of autism that was actualized several decades after the publi-
cation of A Thousand Plateaus. Therefore, this essay maintains that the incorporation of
the notion of the BwO in the contemporary Lacanian corpus can be extremely fruitful,
much more so than designating it as the opposition. For their joint examination opens
up a space for the designation and explication of the autistic ­dynamic-rim-body as one of
the true manifestations of the full BwO.
54   The Body in Theory

Abbreviations
AV: Maleval, L’autiste et sa voix
BA: Laurent, La bataille de l’autisme
TP: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Notes
1. This does not mean that there is no body irrespective of the symbolic order. By arguing that the body is
a secondary phenomenon bestowed by language, Lacan implies that the reality of the body—when “reality” is
taken as “psychic reality”—is always mediated by language. Or, in other words, that the body is always already
experienced as a psychic phenomenon through the meaningful relationships between signifiers.
2. Texts strictly published in French have been translated by the author.
3. This directly contrasts with Lacan’s conception of the subject, in which he clearly distinguishes between
the subject of the unconscious and the ego.
4. Not to mention their apparent readiness to lump psychosis and perversion together in this way, which
flies in the face of Lacan’s structural account of what might be called these alternative subjective structures.
5. It is important to note that Maleval argues that this refusal is primarily associated with a structural defi-
ciency on the level of the invocatory drive and, in this sense, that it is rooted in the subject’s refusal to inscribe
invocatory jouissance in the Other (AV 82–83).
6. It is important to note that, when the Leforts argue that the Other of the image is lacking, they use an
­upper-case “O.” Accordingly, they emphasize the fact that, in autism, it is not the ­lower-case other—the ego
and ­alter-ego—that is directly lacking but the place from which the ­lower-case other is inscribed or reflected,
that is, the Other as the locus of signifiers or the Other as mirror.
7. It is interesting to note, on a clinical level, that among autistic children the erogenous organs seem to
lack a ­rim-like structure. Other than the unbearable anxiety that causes jouissance to circulate through them,
autistic children can be seen to dribble saliva and suffer from uncontrollable bowel movements.
8. According to Lacan, “[W]hatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears
in the real” (Lacan, Seminar III 13).
9. The autistic ­rim-body should not be confused with the “­rim-structure” of the erogenous zones. The first
is a supplementary construction made out of autistic objects, while the latter is a symbolic inscription made
on the body and in the Other.
10. A truly inspiring example of the use of the ­rim-body in this way can be found in Amanda Baggs’s video
testimony In My Language (2007).
11. Two more good examples for the construction of the ­dynamic-rim-body are the case of Charlie (Perrin
65–100) and Temple Grandin’s “squeeze machine” (Grandin 60).
12. This perspective is widely propagated by many ­high-functioning autistic individuals and autism advo-
cates (Sinclair; Grandin; Shapiro).
13. Jon S. Bailey is a leading researcher in the scientific discipline of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), also
called behavioral engineering. ABA is concerned with applying techniques based upon the principles of learn-
ing in the aim of changing behavioral patterns that are deemed ­non-adaptive. ABA is also widely used today in
early intensive behavioral interventions for children diagnosed as autistic.

Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited by
Susan Sontag, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 555–75.
Asperger, Hans. “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood.” Autism and Asperger Syndrome, edited by Uta Frith,
Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 37–92.
Baggs, Amanda. “In My Language.” YouTube, 15 Jan. 2007, https://youtu.be/JnylM1hI2jc.
Bailey, Jon S., and Mary R. Burch. Research Methods in Applied Behavior Analysis. Routledge, 2017.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress. The Free Press, 1967.
_____. “Joey, a ‘Mechanical Boy.’” Scientific American, vol. 200, no. 3, 1959, pp. 116–30.
Braunstein, Néstor. “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan.” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 102–15.
Brenner, Leon S. The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Burgoyne, Bernard. “Autism and Topology.” Drawing the Soul: Schemas and Models in Psychoanalysis, vol. 1,
Karnac Books, 2000, pp. 190–217.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. MIT Press, 2007.
 Is the Autistic Body a Body Without Organs? (Brenner)  55

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. ­Anti-Oedipus. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
_____. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987.
Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University
Press, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 19 (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, translated by James
Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 155–70.
Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism. Vintage, 2006.
Holland, Eugene. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2013.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. Norton, 2006.
_____. “L’étourdit.” THE LETTER, vol. 41, 2009, pp. 31–80.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Norton, 1988.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses. Norton, 1997.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. Polity, 2014.
Laurent, Éric. La bataille de l’autisme. Navarin, 2012.
_____. “Lecture critique II.” L’autisme et la psychanalyse: Colloque de la découverte freudienne, edited by Pierre
Bruno, vol. VIII, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1992.
_____. “Réflexions sur l’autisme.” Bulletin du groupe petite enfance, vol. 10, 1997, pp. 44–45.
Lefort, Rosine, and Lefort Robert. La distinction de l’autisme. Seuil, 2003.
Maleval, ­Jean-Claude. “Extension du spectre de l’autisme.” L’évolution psychiatrique, vol. 90, 2015, pp. 764–81.
_____. “Langue verbeuse, langue factuelle et phrases spontanées chez l’autiste.” La cause freudienne, no. 2,
L’École de la Cause Freudienne, 2011, pp. 77–92.
_____. L’autiste et sa voix. Seuil, 2009.
_____. “Nourrir l’intelligence de l’autiste ou mobiliser sa jouissance?” La cause du désir, vol. 98, no. 1, L’École
de la Cause Freudienne, 2018, pp. 59–66.
Nedoh, Boštjan. “Does the Body Without Organs Have Any Sex at All? Lacan and Deleuze on Perversion
and Sexual Difference.” Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp.
44–55.
Perrin, Myriam. “Construction of an Autistic Dynamic.” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, no. 25, 2012, pp. 65–100.
Shapiro, Joseph. “Autism Movement Seeks Acceptance, Not Cures.” Disabilityscoop: The Premier Source for
Developmental Disability News, 26 Jun. 2006, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5488463.
Sinclair, Jim. “Don’t Mourn for Us. Our Voice.” Autism Network International, 1993, www.autreat.com/dont_
mourn.html.
Smith, Daniel. “What Is the Body Without Organs? Machine and Organism in Deleuze and Guattari.” Conti-
nental Philosophy Review, vol. 51, no. 1, Springer, 2018, pp. 95–110.
Tustin, Frances. Autism and Child Psychosis. Hogarth Press, 1972.
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through
the Lens of Foucault and Lacan
Resistance and Jouissance
Evi Verbeke

I refuse to trust the person who took down the sign at the gates to human-
ity that said: “Caution! Life leads to death!”
—Juli Zeh, The Method

Taking care of our body is an important expectation in contemporary Western soci-

eties. We are told that our body is a temple and that we should stay fit and clean. There
are hundreds of apps that motivate us to go out and exercise, track our steps, or keep a
food diary. We are encouraged to watch our weight, stop smoking, drink less, and exer-
cise as much as possible. These motivations surround us—from the media warning us
that “even consuming one alcoholic drink a day can cause cancer” to the commercials for
female Viagra promoting “low sex drive: now optional.” Even the Belgian Superior Health
Council has warned us that we should not eat granola, get tattoos, or put plastic pots
in the microwave. Nikolas Rose calls this preoccupation with our body “­soma-ethics”
(254). The term “­soma-ethics” means that we identify and understand ourselves in terms
of health and vitality to the body: our body is seen as an enterprise that has an ethical
dimension. We have to take full responsibility for making the best body we possibly can.
It is not a problem if our body is not perfect yet—nobody is perfect!—but there are mul-
tiple experts and techniques available to help us achieve the best possible version of our-
selves. It is our own responsibility, we are advised, to manage our body; therefore, it is our
own fault if our efforts fail.
Silhouetted within these encouragements to have a healthy body is another image:
that of the ­self-destructive body. While the dominant image in our society may be that
of a healthy, ­good-looking youngster or people hitting the gym, reports on rising obe-
sity, ­self-harm, and drug abuse are well known. The ­self-destructive body is a body that
­self-destructs rather than becoming a healthy temple. These bodies are the dark side of
­soma-ethics: its black mirror if you like.
­S elf-destruction is ambiguous. For example, some lifestyles promote obesity
as an alternative to cultural norms. In other instances, ­s elf-destruction is medical-
ized and surrounded by psychological or psychiatric ideas (“­self-harm is a problem of
­impulse-control”; “drug abuse is a wrong coping mechanism”). Many people talk about
how they suffer from their own behavior: people who do not understand why they

56
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  57

starve themselves, who ask for help to quit ­self-harm, who fight drug abuse over and
over again. How can we understand this ­self-destructive body in our society? What is the
link with ­soma-ethics? What can psychoanalysis as a clinical practice illuminate? In this
paper, I will address these questions through the framework of Foucauldian and Laca-
nian theory. I will argue that ­self-destruction is a form of resistance against ­soma-ethics
and, at the same time, that ­self-destruction is a personal way to cope with what Lacan
calls “jouissance.” I will combine both perspectives to come to a new understanding of
­self-destruction, ending with some clinical perspectives and a case study.

­Soma-Ethics and ­Self-Destruction: The Beauty

and Her Black Mirror

­Soma-Ethics: A Discourse to Regulate the Real

From a Foucauldian viewpoint, ­soma-ethics is approached as a discourse regulating
what is normal and abnormal, whom we should help, and in which institutions we should
invest our money. For example, we are inclined to think that being overweight is not only
physically but also psychologically abnormal and that people do in fact suffer from excess
weight. This line of reasoning is accompanied with the idea that we should help people
who are overweight tackle their obesity via ­psycho-education and medical counseling.
People who refuse this kind of help are then seen as irresponsible. This is just one exam-
ple of how the discourse of ­soma-ethics creates expectations of normality and abnor-
mality. To understand ­soma-ethics better, I will use Lacan to situate why ­soma-ethics is a
regulating discourse, and I will use Foucault to argue how ­soma-ethics operates.
First of all, why should we need a discourse that regulates our bodily interactions?
According to Lacan, our body is not a mere thing that is known to us from the start. In
“The Mirror Stage,” he argues that a baby is not born with a ­clear-cut image of his body.
We get to know our body via the Other: in our ­day-to-day contact with other people and
in the broader culture within which we seek to understand our body. For example, we
learn that food goes into our stomachs, that you cannot touch someone else without per-
mission, and that being slim is considered a social ideal.
This process of getting to know our body is not easy. Computers and machines can
be programmed, and yet the human body largely escapes such symbolic direction (Van-
heule 128). In Lacanian terminology, there is always the dimension of the real: incom-
prehensible aspects of our body that are enigmatic. We address that enigma to the Other
(i.e., other people with whom we interact and the broader culture), asking the Other to
help us understand what exactly is going on inside that body. In this process, we receive
an image of our body, and we hear words telling us what our body is like. For exam-
ple, we learn to talk about our body in terms of health, as something that needs rest, as
something we can enjoy but not too much. In doing so, we “­corpo-reify” (corporéifie)
our body, making a thing of our own body without even knowing what is really going
on inside of it (Lacan, “Conférence” 8). The symbolic, which gives us language, and the
imaginary, which gives us images, are registers in which we construct our body and try to
evade the enigma our body poses.
In this sense, we can understand ­s oma-ethics as a collective strategy to under-
stand our body and evade the real. We get to know our body through ­soma-ethics. This
58   The Body in Theory

discourse operates as a mirror that gives us a ­body-image and as a symbolic universe

that gives us language about that body. When I feel miserable and I do not know why,
­soma-ethics can help me pinpoint the reason: it is because I am not slim enough, because
I need to exercise more, because my mind can only be healthy if my body is. ­Soma-ethics
is thus an attempt to overpower the enigma necessitated by the fact of having a body.
Moreover, ­soma-ethics not only regulates the body but also gives us some sense of iden-
tity and an answer to what the Other wants. The enigma of the question “who am I?”
(Lacan, “On a Question” 459) is, for example, mitigated because ­soma-ethics defines
identity in terms of health. Being a good person means taking good care of your body.
To sum up, ­soma-ethics can be understood as a ­symbolic-imaginary strategy to reg-
ulate the real. To understand how a discourse like ­soma-ethics operates, a Foucauldian
framework is useful. For Foucault, discourses have regulating effects on subjectivity via
power relations. One form of power that Foucault describes is especially interesting in
light of our argument: biopower. Foucault describes biopower as a modern form of power
that seeks to “invest life through and through” (History 139). Biopower is about the inter-
est of our modern culture in the life of its citizens: how people eat, how they exercise, how
they sleep. Biopower brings into view a whole range of attempts to intervene upon vital
characteristics of human existence. Human beings are seen as living creatures who are
born, mature, inhabit a body that can be trained and augmented and then sicken and die
(Rose 54). It is a power whose task it is to take charge of life and that is centered around a
norm (Foucault, History 144): for example, the norm to have a healthy body. ­Soma-ethics
could be understood as a specific form of contemporary biopower. It is about an arsenal
of strategies that govern the body of people and give it an ethical dimension.
Considering Foucault’s perspective on biopower, it is important to understand that
this form of power does not simply operate through oppression and submission. In our
case, there is no group of powerful men who planned to influence people by implement-
ing ­soma-ethics. It is not about people intentionally thinking, “If we let people believe
that they constantly have to regulate their body, we could invent products for that and
we will make a lot of money.” Foucault approaches modern power as a network. Power
runs through our social bonds and fuels society. ­Soma-ethics does not belong to certain
people. Rather, ­soma-ethics is embodied in various practices like social media, news-
papers, and the psychological interventions of mental health practitioners. These situa-
tions are devoid of people who intentionally want to oppress others. Power is not merely
an instance that oppresses; it also, as Foucault explains in The History of Sexuality, pro-
duces subjectivity. This means that people gain subjectivity through power relations; for
example, they understand aspects of their identity because other people tell them who
they are. In the case of ­soma-ethics, this gives us a way to think about our body. It makes
us reflect on this body and the way we relate to it. If ­soma-ethics were just a matter of
oppression, it would not hold such an important place in society (Foucault, “Truth and
Power” 120).

Foucault: ­Self-Destruction as Resistance

From this point of view, ­soma-ethics is merely a cultural invention regulated by
power dynamics to cope with the real. ­Soma-ethics gives us the illusion of a body that we
can control and that pacifies us. Of course, this is not the complete story. As previously
suggested, ­soma-ethics has a black mirror image: the ­self-destructive body. Seen from the
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  59

viewpoint of Foucault, we can understand this ­self-destruction as a form of resistance.

Indeed, let us remember his famous claim: “where there is power, there is resistance”
(History 95). For Foucault, resistance is not the opposite of power but is always present
in the power network. Why? Because power always fails at a certain point. No single dis-
course or system will be able to comprise all individuals; there will always be a “residue,”
always something of “the unclassifiable” testifying to the “margins” of power (Foucault,
Psychiatric Power 53). These unclassifiable people testify to the lack of power to control
all individuals; they testify to the way in which discourses lack. As a result, it becomes
possible for individuals who fall outside of the norm to question power. In this sense,
we can understand ­self-destruction as a specific form of resistance against ­soma-ethics.
Like every regime of truth, ­soma-ethics creates a residue of misfits. The command of
­soma-ethics is to “make the best of your body!” At the same time, it creates bodies that
do not obey that command. These bodies seem to say, “So, you want me to make the best
of my body, to see it as an enterprise? I will but in a way that will shock you. I will destroy
my body, and that will be my project.”
We notice this resistant side of ­self-destruction especially when people approach
forms of the “imperfect body” as a lifestyle instead of as a pathology: for example, “pro–
Ana” groups, who promote anorexia as a desirable and ­non-pathological choice. Like-
wise, there are Internet for where people identify themselves as “­s elf-harmers.” The
movement of body positivity tries to convince people that it is okay to be fat or obese.
Some women—for example, the performer Lizzo—convince other women that one does
not have to be slim and toned. They do so by sexualizing their own ­non-slim bodies.
These groups make it possible to think differently about the body.
Not only does ­soma-ethics produce identities when people conform to social ide-
als, but the very acts of resistance against ­soma-ethics create new identities such as
­self-harmer and ­body-positivity girl (Foucault, “Truth and Power” 120). In these acts of
defiance, the body is speaking a certain truth about the power exercised upon it and
about the resistance to that power. According to Judith Butler, “[T]he subject is not only
produced by power, but objects to and counters the way in which it is produced by power”
(17). This assertion is actually surprising because it implies that my body is never solely
mine. I can experience my body as completely my own responsibility, but it is simultane-
ously a locus of power relations: a site where battles of docility and resistance coincide.

Lacan: ­Self-Destruction and Jouissance

Lacan had no proper theory concerning resistance. This is not surprising, given
that he did not develop a viable theory of power. When he spoke about resistance, it was
mostly in pessimistic terms. For instance, he claimed that every form of revolution only
reinstalls the master (Book XVII 207). He did highlight the fact that people search for an
answer for their discontent through different discourses. Yet people will undermine these
answers time and time again because the real will always persist. For Lacan, the real is
that which is dysfunctional and disrupts every discourse. The real will always be present
no matter how much we try to evade it. In this sense, Lacan helps us to understand why
discourse eventually fails. A discourse like ­soma-ethics is a defense against the real, a col-
lective strategy to give us a body. However, this defense will eventually fail because we
cannot eliminate the real. Unlike Foucault, Lacan does not view this failing in terms of
resistance. And yet the combination of a Lacanian approach (about the structural failure
60   The Body in Theory

of discourse) and a Foucauldian approach (about resistance to power) is important for

understanding contemporary ­soma-ethics and ­self-destruction. In order to comprehend
this combination, I will first explain Lacan’s concept of jouissance in more detail and
then combine the approaches of Foucault and Lacan to articulate a new understanding of
resistance.
Lacan refers to the real that persists on the level of the body as “jouissance.” In the
prior discussion of ­soma-ethics and ­self-destructive bodies, I mostly talked about discur-
sive bodies, i.e., the body as constructed through culture and the way bodies can oppose
cultural classifications. For Lacan, there is more than the discursive body. There is also
the body of jouissance, that is, parts of the body that disrupt the imaginary experience
of unity—my body is mine alone; I have control over it—and the smooth articulation of
signifiers—my body is a temple (Vanheule 126–29). Jouissance is the bodily expression
of the real: in other words, an enjoyment that we cannot understand, aspects of our body
that are incomprehensible to us. This is closely connected to Lacan’s comprehension of
the drive. As psychoanalyst Stijn Vanheule puts it, “Jouissance concerns the way the body
is affected by the thrust of the drive, and indicates that beyond the experience of pleasure
a mode of gratification is found in excitation and agitation. The substance of the body is
marked by fleshly urges, which continually disrupt the imaginary experience of unity and
the smooth articulation of signifiers” (129).
Jouissance will always be present because language itself creates jouissance (Lacan,
Book XX 24). In other words, language not only gives us sense and meaning but also con-
fronts us with our lack of being. This is the paradox of discourses: they are ways to evade
the real, and at the same time, they create a lack in the symbolic. For example, by talking
about how important it is to have a healthy body, people will begin to doubt discourses
about healthy bodies: “Should I exercise more?” “Experts give different accounts about
yoga and the amount of sport one should do; whom should I listen to?” If we try to make
sense of our bodies, discourse can help us to situate the real, and at the same time, our
inevitable doubts about that very same discourse will produce jouissance. This is because
talking about our bodies makes us painfully aware of those aspects of the body that
remain incomprehensible. In the case of pregnancy, for example, every culture has rituals
around and explanations about the changing bodies and the actual labor. Although this
information is crucial, it also presents every woman with the fact that her body disrupts
this knowledge. Most women attest to the fact that during labor something unexpected
happens, that their bodies react in a way they had never envisioned. Writer Maggie Nel-
son, for example, wrote about her pregnancy, which occurred simultaneously with the
transition of her partner’s gender. Although Nelson and her partner were well informed
on both subjects and had desired these bodily transformations for quite a while, some
enigma remained; their bodies were not fully under their own control: “Our bodies grew
stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places […]. My
breasts were sore for over a year and they still feel like they belong to someone else” (107).
­Self-destruction is a form of bodily discontent that testifies to the enigma of the
body of jouissance. In this sense, the dynamic of ­self-destruction can be very different for
each person. For example, drug abuse can be a way to aim at more jouissance; think about
people who take drugs in order to enjoy life even as they are destroying it. Or drug abuse
can be a means to eliminate jouissance; think about someone who takes drugs to evade
strange sensations in his body (Loose 185–90). In addition, some people cut themselves
to manage an unbearable jouissance and its accompanying anxiety, while others want to
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  61

make their body repulsive in order to keep other people at a distance. When working in
clinical practice, it is of utmost importance to question the individual’s relation to jouis-
sance. By listening to the symptoms, taking them seriously, and making hypotheses about
the way jouissance presents itself, we can work with people and look for alternatives to
­self-destructive behavior.

­Self-Destruction Revisited
With Lacan, we learn what ­self-destruction can mean at the individual level: a way
to cope with jouissance. With Foucault, we learn what ­self-destruction can mean within
the collective power dynamics: a form of resistance. In combining their approaches, we
can come to a new understanding of resistance, one grounded in jouissance. The line of
reasoning cannot be found in either Foucault or Lacan alone but can be deduced from
their theories to arrive at a new perspective about ­self-destruction.
­Self-destruction is a mode of coping with one’s own corporeal jouissance. At the
same time, it is a means to resist contemporary ­s oma-ethics. These two aspects are
related. In their interplay, there is something peculiar going on. ­Soma-ethics is, as stated
before, a way to evade the real. Yet ­soma-ethics will always fail to evade the real, just
as every discourse fails because we cannot efface the real. This failure creates a lack in
discourse. It is this lack that some people use to cope with their own jouissance in the
sense that ­self-destruction tries to cope with the real by showing that the real is actu-
ally impossible (cf. Lacan, Book XVII 33, 93). Instead of coping with jouissance via the
signifiers delivered by ­soma-ethics, some people will cope with jouissance via the lack
of those very signifiers—that is, through testifying that the signifiers of ­soma-ethics fall
short of solving the problems that attend jouissance. The personal battle with jouissance
is connected to the black mirror of society. ­Self-destruction marks the fact that some-
thing of our own body is unbearable. At the same time, ­self-destruction highlights the
fact that ­soma-ethics has its limits. In resisting power dynamics, ­self-destruction shows
us that power will never disappear but that it, as well as discourse, will always have its
limits. ­Self-destruction does not unveil the authentic body or the undesirable aspects of
­soma-ethics. Instead, ­self-destruction unveils the fact that there is no authentic body, that
jouissance will always interrupt the relation with our own body, and that no single dis-
course can evade this truth about the body.
In most cases, ­self-destruction is first and foremost a way to deal with jouissance
and not intentionally a form of resistance. There are very few people who think, “I
will cut myself in order to question contemporary ­soma-ethics.” In many cases, how-
ever, ­s elf-destruction is a way to regulate jouissance and the body. Furthermore,
­self-destruction begins to function as resistance because jouissance is troublesome for the
whole social network. Although ­soma-ethics tries to cover up jouissance, ­self-destruction
shows time and again that jouissance will never go away.
These ruminations give way to another understanding of resistance. As said before,
Lacan was rather pessimistic about the ability of resistance to make change possible. If
and when we understand resistance as something that resides in the power network and
at the same time shows a lack in that power network, maybe then change becomes pos-
sible because resistance not only touches on the symbolic but also attests to something
of the real in discourse. This reminds us of a remark that Judith Butler once made about
resistance and bodies. She writes that in resistance the body is in a kind of undergoing,
62   The Body in Theory

active, tense, embattled state. The body is not a substance but the “site of transfer for
power itself. Power happens to the body, but this body is also the occasion where some-
thing unpredictable can happen to power itself ” (15). If we follow Butler’s argument,
we can state that the ­self-destructive body is itself inflicted by power, pathologized and
marked as abnormal because it is so different from what ­soma-ethics expects. But at the
same time, the ­self-destructive body is an act of resistance and can change power. As
I argued (and here I take Butler’s argument a step further), ­self-destruction can pro-
voke change because jouissance is involved and thus makes us encounter the real. It not
only tries to question the normalizing answers about our body but also tries to show
that ultimately every discourse bears a lack. The debris of jouissance leads to some-
thing unpredictable, and this unpredictability can cause unexpected effects in power
relationships.

­Soma-Ethics and ­Self-Destruction in Clinical Practice

A Problem for Psychiatry

In what way is the dynamic of ­soma-ethics and ­self-destruction visible in contem-
porary psychiatry? ­Soma-ethics creeps inside the daily practices of psychiatry, for psy-
chiatric institutions often place emphasis on good somatic health. Take the case of some
typical Belgian hospital rules: you may not eat vegetables from the ward’s kitchen garden
because there is no expiration date on them; patients are not allowed in the kitchen pre-
sumably because they are dirty; once you take food out of its package, it has to be thrown
away even if it does not expire for a few more days. ­Soma-ethics becomes a strict normal-
izing and disciplinary practice inside the institution. Patients are often forcibly placed on
a diet, sanctioned when they do not shower every day, and prohibited from drinking any
alcohol at home, even when they do not have a substance abuse problem. This exaggera-
tion of the norm is typical of the institution, where normality presents itself as a principle
of coercion (Foucault, Discipline 184).
At the same time, psychiatry is often asked to cure people of ­self-destruction. This
request does not come easily. Although psychiatry has developed a lot of therapies for
­self-destruction, ­self-destructive behavior has not declined. Rather the opposite is the
current state of affairs: ­self-destruction is on the rise. The reason the ­self-destructive body
is so problematic for dominant psychiatry is not only because it attests to something sub-
versive in the symbolic (the dark side of ­soma-ethics) but also because it simultaneously
stirs up something of the real that ­soma-ethics tries to cover up. Psychiatry does not
know how to deal with ­self-destruction because psychiatry lacks a theory to understand
the real and its ­anxiety-provoking effects. It is for this reason that psychiatry often reacts
with coercion. Patients who cut themselves are constantly supervised and sometimes
secluded, although there is no evidence that these tactics improve safety (Stevenson and
Cutcliffe). Drug users who frequently relapse are often excluded from psychiatric care
(De Ruysscher et al.). Furthermore, different programs for helping people who ­self-harm
insist on a contract in which patients have to promise that they will not harm themselves.
If they do harm themselves, treatment stops for a given period of time. ­Self-destruction
thus points to the fragility of ­soma-ethics as a solution for the real, which is neglected
through coercion and exclusion. Can the theory of ­self-destruction outlined above—the
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  63

critical synthesis of Lacanian jouissance and Foucauldian resistance—help us to formu-

late a different approach to ­self-destruction and (psycho-)therapy?

Some Clinical Perspectives

Unlike classic psychiatry, a Foucauldian and Lacanian analysis does not approach
­self-destruction as mere pathology. However, we cannot ignore the fact that people do
suffer from their own ­self-destructive behavior. Mental suffering is always part of dis-
course, but there is also suffering that escapes discourse, stirs things up, and disrupts
meaning. This is why psychic suffering has to be taken seriously. Psychic suffering is not
just about taking “bad discourses” away or changing society. When we try doing so, suf-
fering will nevertheless remain because the real and jouissance remain. We cannot ignore
psychic suffering or reduce it to a mere ­side-effect of society and culture. That is why psy-
choanalysis as a clinical practice is so important. Psychoanalysis can help people to speak
about their suffering, to think about the context and history of their symptoms, and to
change their relationship with jouissance.1
The problem with Lacanian analysis is that it often stops at the individual/clinical
level, and the resistant side of ­self-destruction is not taken into account. When we under-
stand that ­self-destruction questions the ­self-evidence of ­soma-ethics, then we have to start
listening to patients, ­ex-patients, and movements of people advocating for another view of
the body. As psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni argues, society has a lot to gain in listening to
those who speak up, those who express their despair and revolt, and those who tell a truth
about us and about the structures that imprison us (165). With these acts of revolt, we can
ask ourselves if some ­so-called ­self-evident statements such as “your body is your respon-
sibility” or “being fat is an unhealthy choice” are indeed ­self-evident. Psychiatry should
not only be a place of recovery and healing; it should also provide space to criticize some
aspects of society expressed through a discourse such as ­soma-ethics. For example, psy-
chiatry can question the way insurance companies emphasize individual responsibility in
smoking. Psychiatry can also attest to the impact of poverty or trauma on obesity.
Of course, one can revolt in other ways than by ­self-destruction. Artists, writers,
and musicians also have the power to project something of their distress and revolt onto
“another scene” (Mannoni 61). Take, for example, the novel The Method by Juli Zeh. In
it she describes a world where physical health is the highest virtue. Everyone is obliged
to live a healthy lifestyle, and being sick is a crime. Taking a walk in the park is forbid-
den because of the risk of bacteria, and a relationship is only possible with somebody
with a compatible immune system. As a result, romantic relationships are compromised,
as one scene from the novel suggests: “In a moment, Kramer will lean forward and kiss
Mia as people used to in movies when they didn’t know about the risk of oral infection.”
One of the functions of this novel is to question contemporary ­soma-ethics. Art, like
psychiatry, can thus operate as a form of resistance. Sometimes art and psychiatry can
resist ­hand-in-hand. Villa Voortman, for example, is a community center in Ghent, Bel-
gium, for people with psychosis and habits of drug abuse (De Ruysscher et al.). This cen-
ter operates at the margins of regular psychiatry and hosts many artistic projects such as
theater, music, poetry, and arts. The Villa straddles art and psychiatry and, for that rea-
son, is subversive: it questions the way we handle people who engage in drug abuse and
advances a critique of society in art projects (e.g., music and comical videos that criticize
the ineffective prison punishments for drug abusers).
64   The Body in Theory

Another example of resistance is that of the photographer David Nebreda, an art-

ist who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia at a young age and was frequently hospital-
ized. He mutilates his body in all sorts of ways—for example, by starving himself, cutting
into his flesh, and putting excrement on his face—and photographs his body in these
mutilated and/or mortified states. One of the reasons that his photographs are consid-
ered art is because he challenges our politics of the body: he turns the idea of “the body as
a temple” upside down. The work of Nebreda lives in the black mirror of ­soma-ethics; it
questions our ­self-evident ideas of the body. That is why his pictures have such a paradox-
ical effect of fascination and revulsion at the same time. However, there is more to Nebre-
da’s work than this questioning of ­soma-ethics. It is also a very personal quest to tame
his own demons. As Stijn Vanheule and Abe Geldhof propose, his art could be under-
stood as a sinthôme: it helps him to experience consistency, gives him a feeling of iden-
tity, and exhibits a social function by connecting him to the scene of contemporary art.
Nebreda writes that by mutilating himself he can take the “beast” and the “bad” out of his
own body. In our understanding, Nebreda means that the mutilation helps him to regu-
late his corporeal jouissance (Vanheule and Geldhof 124–125). His attack on the body is
an answer to an unbearable jouissance, a necessary way to come into being but one that
defies dominant discourse and revolts against social norms.

Case Study
I conclude with the case of Paula, a woman aged 45 years old, who had various hos-
pitalizations at the psychiatric ward where I worked.2 For a long time, Paula lived on her
own and had a job as a cashier. After several mental breakdowns, independent living was
no longer possible, and she was obliged to live in an institution for people with a mental
handicap. Paula has mutilated herself frequently in diverse ways: cutting her flesh, put-
ting a hot iron on her arm, and throwing herself out of a window. The institution where
she lives is puzzled by Paula’s actions, not knowing how to handle Paula and afraid that
one day she will accidentally kill herself. Paula is sometimes hospitalized in our ward,
mostly for periods ranging from two weeks to three months. She tells me, referring to her
­self-injury: “It is stupid what I am doing, all these stupid things I do.” She sometimes talks
about her brothers and sisters, who have no handicap and live a different life; they have
a home of their own, children, and a marriage. She has hardly any contact with them.
Another important theme in therapy is her reflections on the institution where she lives.
Paula can be very critical of the caregivers, especially because they interfere too much.
She says, “They always want to have a say in what I am doing and who I am seeing. Screw
them.”
In older reports, her ­self-destruction is mostly interpreted as a pathological symp-
tom of borderline personality disorder. Paula was diagnosed as someone who needs to
learn other coping mechanisms. Most reports conclude that she is ­treatment-resistant
or lacks the cognitive abilities to benefit from therapy. It is clear, however, that the old
approach, diagnosis, and conclusions are not fruitful.
From another perspective, we can hear a resistance in Paula. Her ­self-destruction
always targets someone: there is always someone who should be looking, who is a pas-
sive victim of Paula’s ­self-destruction. For example, she bruises herself and then lies
down in the living room where everybody comes and goes. As indicated before, institu-
tions in Belgium have strict rules about promoting good health and minimizing risks of
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  65

contamination. Thus, when Paula cuts herself and runs around with bleeding arms, she
engages in a subversive act, targeting the exorbitant focus on cleanliness.
Moreover, Paula’s ­self-injury is an act of resistance against institutionalization and
“handicapization.” Although Paula used to be viewed as “a borderliner,” she is now seen
as a woman with mental retardation. Her ­self-injury is often comprehended as a sign of
emotional immaturity. But is not this diagnosis of mental retardation precisely what is so
painful for Paula? In talking about ­self-injury, she tells us that she is “stupid to cut her-
self.” She identifies with the idea of retardation, but it seems that this identification hides
something. Paula can say that she is stupid, but at the same time, she challenges that stu-
pidity. Paula tries to resist the image of the “good retarded woman.” In institutional life, a
docile body—one belonging to a person who listens and does not question given power
dynamics or coercion—is often targeted. But Paula resists being the retarded body; she
shows no signs of the asylum docility we often notice in people with mental retardation.
Paula loves to criticize her caregivers and seems to enjoy seeing them nonplussed when
she hurts herself. At the same time, she is genuinely afraid that they will stop helping her
because she is too much to handle.
If resistance were the only thing at stake, helping Paula would not be very difficult.
Some institutional changes would have been enough. Here a Lacanian approach is fruit-
ful. Paula has a long history of sexual abuse that began when she was a child. She does
not speak that often about it, but sometimes she says the memories still haunt her. As
previously stated, we get to know our body via the Other, who gives us images of and
language about our body. However, Paula encountered an abusive Other. The borders
between her own body and that of others were not respected. In the process of getting to
know her body, she received an image of her body as a place where the Other could do as
he pleased. As a child, Paula was unable to understand the Other’s encroachment on her
body. Lacking the possibility of being psychologically processed, the trauma cannot be
translated in language and is inscribed onto the body itself instead (Verhaeghe 316). Her
­self-injury seems to be an actualization of this traumatic encounter: it reenacts an incom-
prehensible and brutal abuse of the body. At the same time, it seems as if the ­self-injury
is a means to get a grip on her body, to make it her own to control. Through ­self-injury,
Paula controls her body and the enigma that it poses. Her body is no longer controlled by
someone else; she does with it as she pleases.
­Self-injury for Paula is thus an act of resistance and a way to cope with past traumatic
experiences. When Paula mutilates herself, she tries to cope with the real of the trauma
she endured. The jouissance that is at play here criticizes at the same time ­soma-ethics:
through her mutilation, Paula not only copes with her mental distress; she defies institu-
tional life and criticizes ­soma-ethics.

Conclusion
This paper has tried to understand ­s elf-destruction as the black mirror of
­soma-ethics: ­self-destruction testifies to the failing of ­soma-ethics. Although ­soma-ethics
tries to give us answers about our body, it will eventually fail because ­soma-ethics can-
not rid us of the real. ­Self-destruction is a testament to this failing and a mark of the
persistence of the real in ­s oma-ethics. ­S elf-destruction is a way to cope with one’s
own jouissance by using and testifying to the lack in ­s oma-ethics. By showing this
66   The Body in Theory

failing, ­self-destruction can become a way to resist the normalizing power dynamics of
­soma-ethics.
It should be clear, however, that ­self-destruction is not a mere form of pathology
that we must eradicate with pills and psychotherapy. ­Self-destruction is a specific mode
of coping with jouissance, and at the same time, it is a form of resistance against domi-
nant ­soma-ethics. Instead of being repulsed by and afraid of those bodies that speak a dif-
ferent truth from that of dominant discourses, we should listen to what those bodies tell
us about contemporary society. If ­self-destruction functions as a black mirror, then it can
warn us about the power dynamics in our society and the devastating effects that regulat-
ing discourses can have on some individuals. This does not mean that we should idealize
madness. ­Self-destruction is not only about resistance; it is also about psychic suffering.
The psychiatric institution should be a place where we try to help people to cope with the
puzzling enigma of their jouissance, and it should be a place that is sensitive to the resi-
dues that dominant discourses produce. In short, psychiatry does not have to be a place
where people get fixed in order to function in society, as is often the case. Quite the con-
trary, psychiatry should be a place for personal recovery and resistance against dominant
discourses in society.
According to Lacan, we can never heal the ravages of the real. Foucault states that we
can never have a society without power. Combining these claims, we can state that power
is necessary to cope with the real. Yet power will fail because we cannot eliminate the real.
This failure opens up room for resistance. Leonard Cohen once sang, “There is a crack
in everything, / that is how the light gets in.” Maybe we can rephrase his lyrics in light of
this essay: “There is a crack in everything, that is how the real and resistance get in.” We
should not try to fill up that crack. Instead, we should attend to that crack and to what it
says about our society.

Notes
1. To read an illustration of this, I refer the reader to the book Le Corps pris au mot of psychoanalyst Hélène
Bonnaud. In this book, she offers various cases of patients in analysis who have problems with their body
ranging from anorexia to ­self-injury and problematic pregnancies.
2. Paula, a pseudonym, has given me written permission to recount her story. Ward “De Meander,” where
I worked as a clinical psychologist, was a ward for adolescents and adults with mental retardation and psychi-
atric problems.

Works Cited
Bonnaud, Hélène. Le corps pris au mot. Navarin/Le Champ Freudien, 2015.
Butler, Judith. “Bodies and Power, Revisited.” Radical Philosophy, no. 114, 2002, pp. 13–19.
De Ruysscher, Clara, et al. “A Place to Be (Me): A Qualitative Study on an Alternative Approach to Treat-
ment for Persons with Dual Diagnosis.” ­Drugs-Education Prevention and Policy, vol. 26, 2017, pp. 50–
59.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books,
1977.
_____. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin Books,
1978.
_____. Psychiatric Power. Edited by Jacques Lagrange, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan,
2006. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974.
_____. “Truth and Power.” Power, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 2000, pp. 111–
33. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, general editor, Paul Rabinow, vol. 3, The New Press, 1997–2000.
Lacan, Jacques. “Conférence à Genève sur le symptôme.” La cause du désir, no. 95, 2017, pp. 7–24.
 The ­Self-Destructive Body through the Lens of Foucault and Lacan (Verbeke)  67

_____. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: The
First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 75–81.
_____. “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
English, translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 445–88.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain
Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, Norton, 2007.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce
Fink, Norton, 1998.
Loose, Rik. The Subject of Addiction. Karnack, 2002.
Mannoni, Maud. Elles ne savent pas ce qu’elles disent. Denoël, 1998.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Melville House UK, 2015.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the ­Twenty-First Century. Princ-
eton University Press, 2007.
Stevenson, Chris, and John Cutcliffe. “Problematizing Special Observation in Psychiatry: Foucault, Archaeol-
ogy, Genealogy, Discourse, and Power/Knowledge.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, vol.
13, 2006, pp. 713–21.
Vanheule, Stijn. The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Vanheule, Stijn, and Abe Geldhof. “Knotted Subjectivity: On Lacan’s Use of Knot Theory in Building a
­Non-universal Theory of the Subject.” Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis, edited by Aydan Gülerce, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012, pp. 114–28.
Verhaeghe, Paul. On Being Normal and Other Disorders. Translated by Sigi Jottkandt, Karnack, 2008.
Zeh, Juli. The Method. Translated by ­Sally-Ann Spencer, Vintage Publishing, 2014.
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body
Marina Cano

She sleeps on the couch—eye mask in place and cushion held tightly under her head.
The room is dark, and furniture floats above her head: a small mahogany table, the rick-
ety kitchen chairs, an umbrella stand shaped like a goose. She too is floating on her couch,
with her eye mask and her cushion, while cod and sea bass swim outside the windows.
The room is situated at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by dancing seaweed whose
movements beckon the viewer in. Are these representations of her past lives, those lost
in recorded history? Or her unconscious fantasies, drives, and desires? After all, Freud
made it clear that the dream is a habitual channel for desire and wish fulfillment. But
desire for what exactly? Before an answer becomes clear, the alarm clock goes off: Elisa
wakes up, removes her sleeping mask, runs a bath, and boils three eggs for her lunch. It is
the beginning of the day.
Thus Guillermo del Toro’s ­award-winning film The Shape of Water (2017) opens. The
­dream-like quality of this overture is replicated throughout the film, most of which takes
place at night time. With its surrealist symbolism (eggs, water) and rundown settings
(the flat), The Shape of Water exists in an oneiric space closer to the imaginary, and per-
haps the real, than the symbolic. Set in 1962 Baltimore, it tells the story of Elisa Esposito,
a mute cleaner at the Occam Aerospace Research Center. One day the Center receives a
special “asset”: an amphibian humanoid creature with two alternate breathing mecha-
nisms and extraordinary healing powers. The U.S. government aims to study the crea-
ture’s properties and so learn what special conditions man might need to endure in space.
But the person in charge of the project, Colonel Richard Strickland, believes that the best
way to do so is by vivisecting the Amphibian.
In this essay, I read Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water through a Lacanian
lens to unveil what notions of the body, especially the disabled body, it propounds and
ultimately to investigate the larger question of how or whether Lacanian theory can be
of use to disability studies in the ­twenty-first century. I argue that the film allows for
new, ­non-normative forms of subjectivity by depicting the disabled body (Elisa’s and the
Amphibian’s) as whole, complete, and coordinated. In contrast, it is the very able and
“normal” but amputated body (Strickland’s) that seems to reveal lack, absence, or castra-
tion. For this argument, I draw on Jacques Lacan’s theories of the mirror stage, castration,
and psychosis. As the process whereby the ego is constituted (once the subject sees him-
or herself as whole, no longer fragmented), the mirror stage is of obvious interest for dis-
ability studies. One of the founders of the field, Lennard Davis, revisits Lacan’s theories
in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, a work on which I also draw

68
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  69

in my examination. Davis reads the disabled body as an uncomfortable reminder of our

inherent fragmentation. When the ­able-bodied look at a disabled individual, whose body
they perceive as literally fragmented or somehow incomplete, they are reminded of the
fragmentation of their own bodies—and indeed of all bodies (140). One cultural example
of this alarming fragmentation is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and its filmic after-
life. Although Frankenstein’s creature—also known as “the monster”—has no apparent
disability in the novel, he is an object of fear and horror because his body is literally made
up of bits and pieces (Davis 143). These notions of le corps morcelé in Lacan and Davis, I
bring to my reading of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.
Film is an inherently voyeuristic medium, inevitably making the genre of interest to
examinations of the body. On screen, the body is being constantly exhibited, constituted,
and reconstituted. But film is also one of the means through which ideas and beliefs
spread in the West: not only are movies signs of cultural activity (in this case, a reflection
of how perceptions of the disabled body might have evolved), but also, more importantly,
they are active participants in the formation of such systems of belief. The film indus-
try can advance change, and a film such as The Shape of Water, a Hollywood production
with thirteen Oscar nominations and four Academy Awards, actively promotes certain
understandings of the body. It is because of this interest in the body that the present essay
examines Del Toro’s film at the level of plot and narrative primarily rather than at a cine-
matographic, technical level. The latter would supply rich material for a different type of
study, but that approach is beyond the scope of the present study.
The Shape of Water provides viewers with a new vocabulary to think about dis-
abled bodies, which breaks the ableist stranglehold on the body. Neither Elisa nor the
Amphibian is fragmented, literally or metaphorically, for their bodies are complete and
fully functioning even if they produce no verbal sound. On the contrary, it is the appar-
ently ­able-bodied Richard Strickland—white, male, straight, ­middle-class—whose body
is literally in pieces and whose mirror stage has visibly gone wrong. Thus, the film seems
to reconceive the body outside the restrictive binarism of able and disabled, making Del
Toro’s a potential version of the body, all bodies, for the advancing ­twenty-first century.
In this sense, my Lacanian reading of the film below also serves as a reminder of the
prevalence of the body, imaginary or symbolic, in discussions of disability. At a time of
increasing social constructivism in disability studies, such a reminder, I argue, is part of
what psychoanalysis can bring to the field: the material body not as a substitute for the
constructivist’s ideational one but as part of a holistic approach that takes both bodies
into account.

The Disabled Body

The importance of the mirror stage for Lacan lies in its formative effects, in the
way it sheds light on the formation of the I (Écrits 75). As neonatal, the subject experi-
ences the body as fragmented and uncoordinated, just a mere assemblage of limbs. Then
between the ages of six and eighteen months, the child recognizes its own image in the
mirror for the first time, detecting a correlation between its movements and those of its
specular image (75). This image is complete, coherent, and coordinated, and for this rea-
son, it is an illusion that suggests a stage of development well beyond the actual. As Lacan
puts it, the subject “identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body,” but “that gestalt is
70   The Body in Theory

an ideal unity, a salutary imago” (92). This notion of fictional unity is what Davis expands
upon when he revisits Lacan: “The disabled body is a direct imago of the repressed frag-
mented body. The disabled body causes a kind of hallucination of the mirror phase gone
wrong. The subject looks at the disabled body and has a moment of cognitive dissonance,
or should we say a moment of cognitive resonance with the earlier state of fragmentation”
(Enforcing Normalcy 139). A “normal” person looking at a disabled one reproduces the
earlier mirror stage and what it would have been like if that process had gone wrong—
in other words, if rather than seeing its body as a whole, the infant had been confronted
with its still fragmented body in the looking glass. For Davis, the ­non-disabled observ-
ing the disabled individual are made aware that their bodies too are fragmented, that they
are also in pieces. As a literalization of this fragmentation, the disabled body alerts us to
it and makes it inescapable.
Or so the theory goes. I argue that, in The Shape of Water, the disabled characters,
Elisa and the Amphibian, end up being complete and unified, escaping to an imaginary
universe (in the Lacanian sense of the word) outside the norm. To be sure, neither is liter-
ally fragmented: they are mute and/or different looking but without missing limbs. Lacan
regarded any sense of disunity as fragmentation, not only physical disunity (Seminar III,
39). As for Davis, his definition of disability is wide too: disability constitutes a disrup-
tion of the visual field or any other sensory field such as the auditory or the perceptual
(128–29). Elisa’s muteness disrupts more than one sensory field: she upsets the auditory
field due to her inability to produce sound, while her use of sign language to communi-
cate unsettles the “normal” visual landscape. The same applies to the Amphibian, whose
odd features—scales, crest, and moist skin, for example—cause him to disrupt the field of
vision as much as Frankenstein’s creature does.
As a differently abled individual, Elisa Esposito has tasted the social stigma of dis-
ability. One of her ­co-workers addresses her as “dummy,” saying cruelly, “Hey, dummy,
phone call for you.” This insulting form of address, in its linguistic polyvalence, implies
that muteness is regarded as a form of mental incompetence. Earlier in the film the same
­co-worker refers to Elisa as “the mute.” Less obviously charged than “dummy,” this label
nevertheless constructs Elisa as someone whose entire identity is defined by her dis-
ability—something disability activists have long protested. Simi Linton, among others,
laments that disabled characters onscreen tend to be depicted as childish, incompetent,
passive, or friendless; they are rarely “in control of their own lives—in charge or actively
seeking out and obtaining what they want and need” (168; see also Mitchell and Sny-
der). It is here that Elisa stands out as an unusual representation of a disabled character
so active and resourceful that she concocts a plan to rescue the Amphibian, which eludes
the ­high-security systems of the U.S. Army. The plan involves moving the security cam-
eras to create a blind spot and hiding the Amphibian in a laundry trolley under dirty tow-
els. And the plan succeeds.
Elisa is not friendless either. Her plan succeeds because she has the help of Zelda, an
African-American fellow cleaner, and Giles, an aging gay illustrator and Elisa’s ­next-door
neighbor. The former helps Elisa get the Amphibian into the car, and the latter drives it
out of Occam. Against the conventional representations of disability outlined by Lin-
ton, Elisa is shown as intelligent and capable of deep friendships. Most characters in the
film—certainly most “good” characters—have some form of social disability. There might
be no physical impairment, but Giles, Zelda, and others stand outside the norm of the
white, able, heterosexual, ­middle-class America represented by Strickland. The gay artist
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  71

and former alcoholic (Giles), the black ­working-class cleaner (Zelda), and the Russian
spy (Dr. Hoffstetler, who facilitates the flight by turning off the power)—all seem to ques-
tion not what disability is but what normality is or whether it exists at all.
If Elisa does not adhere to typical representations of disability onscreen, it is equally
important to spell out the obvious: she is the heroine of the film and, as such, the organiz-
ing center around which everything else revolves. In the same vein as Linton, Davis notes
that disabled characters in novels are often secondary, outcasts or villains; if they happen
to be central to the plot, their disability has to be overcome for them to be granted their
“happy” ending (41). None of this applies to Elisa, who is disabled, remains disabled, and
is also the heroine of what might be loosely called a romantic comedy. At the start of the
film, the narrator, in ­voice-over, introduces Elisa as “the princess without voice” and the
story as a sort of fairy tale that “happened a long time ago, it seems, in the time of a fair
princess’s reign,” in “a small city near the coast, quite far from everything else.” This is Del
Toro’s version of the quintessential fairy tale opening of “once upon a time, in a land far,
far away.” My point here is this: how many fairy tales, not just novels or films, do we know
where princess and prince are disabled? Herein lies part of the film’s innovation.
The prince, the hero of this romantic comedy, also has a deviant body—and the
happy ending will not involve adopting a normative shape. As a disabled character, the
Amphibian echoes the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—for Davis, the ultimate
disabled hero or ­anti-hero (143). In both cases, their disability lies primarily in the odd-
ity of their looks: Frankenstein’s creature has “yellow skin,” “watery eyes,” and “black lips,”
which jointly give him a monstrous, because nonstandard, appearance (39). The Amphib-
ian might seem human in so far as he is bipedal, but he has gills, claws, and webbed fin-
gers, like a frog. It is the strangeness of his appearance, perhaps more than his inability to
produce sound, that is cause for oppression. Strickland makes this clear when he refers
to the Amphibian as “that filthy thing,” “ugly as sin.”1 The latter comment is made during
one torture session, when the Amphibian is chained to the ground and tormented with
a ­high-voltage cattle prod. (The animalizing insult here is clear: the Amphibian is like
cattle, an animal). Lacan notes that images of fragmented bodies—of “castration, emas-
culation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration”—can trigger aggressive
impulses. The viewer recognizes something of him- or herself in these partial imagos and
reacts violently against them (Écrits 85). In this sense, if the disabled body is perceived as
the fragmented body, as Davis suggests, Strickland’s aggressive impulses and obsession
with vivisecting the Amphibian at all costs could be seen as fear of ­self-recognition. In
short, sensing some of his own monstrosity in the Amphibian, Strickland fears identifica-
tion, just as Victor Frankenstein fears to see himself in his creature.2
Like Frankenstein’s creature, the Amphibian is “abnormal” in the sense that he is
above, not below, average. Shelley’s character, as Davis points out, can survive in extreme
climatic conditions, run faster than any man, and climb steep mountains. Similarly, the
Amphibian is extraordinarily strong and has powers of healing beyond human med-
icine: at the end of the movie, he heals himself after being repeatedly shot; earlier he
heals Giles’s deep wounds through the laying on of hands. Both Frankenstein’s crea-
ture and the Amphibian can be violent: for example, the former kills Frankenstein’s little
brother, while the latter devours a cat and wounds Giles. But they are also capable of deep
emotion: just as Frankenstein’s creature becomes attached to the De Lacey family, the
Amphibian becomes attached to Elisa, small blue lights sparkling throughout his body as
signs of love, friendship, or arousal.
72   The Body in Theory

The point here is not only to identify the numerous similarities between Del Toro’s
and Shelley’s disabled characters but also—and more importantly—to identify the ques-
tions both works pose: what is a human, what is normal, and what makes someone a
human being? Frankenstein’s creature is a composite of human and animal body parts;
the Amphibian is humanoid but has animal traits such as gills and claws. Strickland
justifies his aggression by dismissing the Amphibian as “an animal” that must be kept
tame. Yet the Amphibian is also shown in very human, domestic scenes—for instance,
sitting at the breakfast table with Elisa. He transgresses the boundaries between ani-
mal and human, able and disabled, and even man and woman. His genital area looks
flat, like a woman’s, his penis being lodged in a cavity inside the body. If, as Rosemarie
­Garland-Thomson notes, “[d]isability is the unorthodox made flesh, refusing to be nor-
malized, neutralized, or homogenized” (Extraordinary, 24), the Amphibian is the exact
representation of the disabled body: unorthodox, ­non-normative, and impossible to
translate into normalized discourse.
Far from confirming the perceived fragmentation of the disabled body, à la Len-
nard Davis à la Jacques Lacan, The Shape of Water shows, and celebrates, how Elisa and
the Amphibian achieve a sense of unity and completion without “overcoming” their dis-
ability. They do so through numerous mirror scenes, corresponding to what Lacan calls
the “aha moment,” in which the individual jubilantly identifies “with the total form […]
with the image of his body” (Écrits 355–56). Let us take, for instance, the protagonists’
first scene of mirroring: Elisa is alone in the ­high-security lab where the Amphibian is
kept prisoner; she hears the creature in the water tank and approaches the glass sur-
face, acting here as a mirror. Elisa and the Amphibian stare at each other in wonder and
fascination; they lean forward, resting their hands/claws on the glass surface, as if try-
ing to touch and kiss the other. At this point, their images become perfectly symmetri-
cal, and the scene becomes foldable down the middle. Such a lure—the fascination of the
imaginary—amounts to a narcissistic moment of ­self-recognition. Indeed, Elisa and the
Amphibian are strong echoes of each other, for both are water beings: just as the Amphib-
ian has two sets of gills around his neck, Elisa (an orphan found by the river) bears a tri-
ple scar mark in the same place. In an earlier mirror scene, she contentedly examines her
scars before diving into the bathtub; for her, these marks seem no bodily defect but an
object of fascination and curiosity.
The bathtub later becomes the site of another scene of mirroring between Elisa and
the Amphibian. Having successfully managed their escape from the research laboratory,
Elisa brings the Amphibian home and immediately runs a bath for him. Worried about
the effects of the drive and the time spent out of water, Elisa nervously adds a mix of salts
and minerals and waits for them to take effect. As both lean towards each other, their
similarities become more obvious than ever: Elisa’s green and aquamarine cleaning uni-
form and her grey cardigan parallel the colors of the Amphibian’s skin. Their gestures also
mirror each other: once the Amphibian breathes again—deeply inhales and exhales—
Elisa too heaves a sigh of relief. Like the child in front of the Lacanian mirror, the charac-
ters detect a correlation between their movements and those of their imago. Facing each
other, facing the other with a lower case “o,” they see themselves as complete and unified
for the first time.
This sense of wholeness and completion takes Del Toro’s depiction of disability
beyond the apparent fragmentation of the disabled body outlined by Davis. In other
words, far from becoming a representation of the mirror stage gone wrong, the disabled
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  73

here are the embodiment of the mirror stage gone right—very right. Elisa’s newly
acquired synthetic ego becomes obvious when she later daydreams of being a Hollywood
star. In the style of Golden Age musicals, Elisa imagines herself emerging onstage sing-
ing to the Amphibian “You’ll Never Know” in imitation of Alice Faye. In this imaginary
world, she has a vocal capacity and sees herself as a whole subject: beautiful and glamor-
ous, dressed in a muslin gown and singing and dancing with the Amphibian, à la Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire, while a band of musicians plays for their benefit.
As this scene exemplifies, the mirror stage is a jubilant moment of recognition, the
onset of desire and jouissance. Lacan regards the mirror as the only way to apprehend
desire, for as soon as children discern their specular image, “they fall in love with it, and
this is the first signification by which narcissism envelops the forms of desire” (Écrits
355). Elisa’s desire for the Amphibian is to some extent narcissistic: after encountering the
image in the mirror (the Amphibian), her routine morning masturbation is replaced by
desire for this “small other” that is, at least to some extent, herself. The setting for both is
the bathtub, the locale for jouissance in the movie’s exegesis. During one of their sexual
encounters, Elisa floods the bathroom, opening all taps and covering the gap under the
door with towels. Water starts pouring into neighboring flats and even the cinema down-
stairs. When Giles comes to see about the origin of the leak, he discovers Elisa and the
Amphibian in a moment of orgasmic bliss. Blue lights sparkle through the Amphibian’s
body as the two embrace. Elisa gives Giles a smile of perfect satisfaction; the look on her
face is one of jouissance, “a kind of pleasure beyond the pleasure principle” (Fink 240).
There is a feeling of fullness, wholeness, and completion—nothing fragmented or lack-
ing here.
To be sure, in Lacan this imaginary sense of wholeness cannot be sustained indef-
initely, and its persistence in the film might seem problematic from a disability studies
perspective. For Lacan, the imaginary is the realm of lure and seduction, but ultimately
it is an illusion; and to remain in the realm of illusion is tantamount to turning a blind
eye to reality, allowing oneself to be acted upon rather than acting. It might, then, seem
counterproductive to base representations of the disabled body on such a conception. Yet
I would argue that, at present at least, given Western fears of disability and ­pre-imaginary
fragmentation, Del Toro’s depiction has a compensatory effect. Like the filmic and pic-
torial equivalent of positive discrimination, it forces viewers to stop and acknowledge
­non-normative bodies as other than aberrant, as beyond the Frankenstein cultural tradi-
tion. It is this reality outside normative reality that the film ultimately upholds.
In Lacanian theory, the mirror stage is followed by the subject’s entrance into the
symbolic. This happens when the father interrupts the exclusive, dyadic relation between
mother and child, thereby introducing the child into language and culture. The imagi-
nary order is, thus, overwritten by the new symbolic dimension. In The Shape of Water,
the Amphibian seemingly enters a linguistic system as Elisa teaches him sign language,
namely, the gestures for “egg” and “music.” This is a system of signs with a signifier (the
hand gesture) and a signified (the egg); at the same time, it eludes conventional systems
of signification and escapes the figure of authority represented by Richard Strickland.
Following the Amphibian’s escape, Strickland ­cross-examines all employees. When Elisa’s
turn comes, she signs “Fuck you” to Strickland, who does not understand and becomes
increasingly violent. Kicking his desk, he impatiently demands to know what Elisa is say-
ing. Her stance outside conventional language gives her power over Richard Strickland,
the normative figure who masquerades as representative of the ­Name-of-the-Father.
74   The Body in Theory

In The Shape of Water, the constitutive symbolic order appears deeply flawed.
Although the language of the ­deaf-mute is a system of signs and thus participates in the
symbolic, it seems to bring individuals closer to the signified than vocal language does.
Explicating the work of an ­eighteenth-century ­deaf-mute, Davis observes that “[t]he
metonymic nature of sign anchors the deaf to the signified rather than the signifier. As
such, sign can better express emotions and sentiments” (69). Rather than being part of
a system where one signifier leads to another—as in Derridean and Lacanian thought—
sign language allows a more direct connection between the signifier (the gesture) and
the signified (the egg). It also involves a greater connection to the body: sign language
is physical, energetic, bodily, and, in this sense, requires good coordination skills. Elisa
indeed possesses good motor coordination from the start. She is shown, for instance, tap
dancing her way to the flat in imitation of Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson’s staircase
dance in The Little Colonel (1935).
This greater connection to the body and the signified inherent in sign language
points towards the imaginary order. For Lacan, the imaginary stands outside the sym-
bolic but not outside signification, for the imaginary is partly connected to language at
the level of the signified (as in ­deaf-mute sign language) rather than of the signifier (as
in the symbolic register). It is in this realm of illusion, synthesis, and wholeness that I
argue the hero and heroine of The Shape of Water remain. The tragedy of the mirror stage
(the infant’s entrance into the symbolic and its loss of an earlier sense of completion) is
thus averted. As if challenging a symbolic system based on binary thinking and the con-
ception of the disabled body as inexorably fragmented, Elisa and the Amphibian reject
conventional society by the end of the film. The Amphibian jumps into the canal hold-
ing Elisa’s body in his arms after she has been shot by Strickland. As he kisses her under-
water, Elisa breathes again, her neck scars finally becoming gills. They linger in this final
embrace at the bottom of the ocean, enveloped by a halo of light. Such oneiric space,
which evokes images of birth and the womb, recreates a primal, ­non-normative scene
and allows the characters to break away from the seemingly ableist discourse of the sym-
bolic. This departure from the symbolic is something that the film also achieves through
its treatment of Richard Strickland.

The Castrated Body

So far I have been arguing that neither Elisa nor the Amphibian is literally or sym-
bolically fragmented, that their bodies are whole and fully functioning, even if not sound
producing. By contrast, it is the allegedly ­non-disabled character, the ­hyper-normal
Richard Strickland, whose body appears in fragments and whose mirror stage has
gone utterly wrong, as illustrated by various mirror scenes in the film. As government
employee responsible for the “asset,” Strickland loses two of his fingers when he is bit-
ten by the Amphibian.3 The fingers are ­re-attached during surgery, albeit not very suc-
cessfully, and then lost again. The only character with missing limbs, Strickland is never
treated as maimed or disabled in the social model sense of the word. The British social
model of disability distinguishes between disability (socially constructed, external) and
impairment (bodily, medical, and internal). According to Tobin Siebers, the flaw of this
model is its tendency to deny the physical reality and real pain involved in some cases of
disability. Tom Shakespeare concurs that the social model, widespread in discussions of
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  75

disability since the late twentieth century, often overlooks the intrinsic limitations faced
by many disabled people by insisting that barriers are social and externally constructed.
In The Shape of Water, Strickland is not treated as disabled although he is clearly
impaired—i.e., missing limbs. Conversely, Elisa and the Amphibian are treated as dis-
abled, their bodies being different looking but not obviously impaired. Despite the cri-
tique of the ­normal-symbolic seemingly conducted by the film, a Lacanian analysis can
nevertheless offer insights into The Shape of Water and modern representations of dis-
ability. What a Lacanian reading brings to the film, and potentially other films, is a larger
consideration of the body, imaginary or symbolic. I am not suggesting that analyses of
disability should be exclusively or even primarily Lacanian; such an approach would
carry a different set of problems, not least of which is the obliteration of social context
and ­socio-economic factors—after all, Elisa is a cleaner. What I am proposing is a wider,
more multidisciplinary approach to disability, an approach that considers the socially
constructed as well as the physical reality of the body and combines sociology, philos-
ophy, literary studies, film studies, history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, among
other disciplines.
In this section, I focus on Strickland’s maimed body to argue that the loss of his two
fingers is a form of castration and that the film’s depiction of the able (but amputated)
body as castrated, faulty, and partial is yet one more way in which it challenges the hege-
mony of normality and intimates the sheer triviality of the categories “able” and “dis-
abled.”4 At first sight, Richard Strickland seems the epitome of normality. He lives in a
large house in the suburbs with his wife and two kids. When Daddy walks in after a long
nightshift, the children, who are kneeling in front of the TV before school, immediately
stand up and run to hug him. In the kitchen, the mother—wearing high heels, a careful
hairdo, and makeup—hands the ­hard-working man of the house his cooked breakfast.
This sense of normality, of the American dream, of the nuclear family, is tied to certain
notions of masculinity. Strickland often discusses the importance of being a man and
acting like one (whatever that means). In one early scene, he steps into the male toilet at
the lab, while Zelda and Elisa are cleaning. He urinates in their presence, and when Elisa
offers him a hand towel, he shakes his head, saying, “No, a man washes his hands before
or after tending to his needs. It tells you a lot about a man. He does it both times, it points
to weakness in character.” Such insistence might suggest a sense of lack already, just as the
cattle prod he carries with him to the toilet suggests the need for a prop, a fake phallus, to
make up for his deficiencies.
What happens right afterwards confirms this reading. The next scene shows Strick-
land walking out of the high security lab: he holds his left hand tightly, stumbles, and falls
upon his knees, shirt smeared in blood. After bragging about manliness, two of his fin-
gers are severed, his primary signifier lost. Fingers are phallic in shape and, like the phal-
lus, are salient organs whose position as “a ‘pointy extremity’ in the form predisposes it to
the fantasy of it falling off ” (Écrits 696–697). Of course, in Lacanian thinking, the phal-
lus is not the penis, the biological male sexual organ. Freud famously noted the boy’s
fear that his penis would be cut off by the father, but Lacan conceived of castration as “a
symbolic lack of an imaginary object” instead; in other words, “castration does not bear
on the penis as a real organ, but on the imaginary phallus” (Evans 23). In the film, the
infant’s fantasy that the phallus might fall off is actualized when Strickland loses some of
his salient organs. As a result, he also loses the symbolic system of order, meaning, and
hierarchy that he thought himself to inhabit and control.
76   The Body in Theory

Two subsequent scenes confirm Strickland’s castration. On the morning after the
incident, Strickland comes back home and has sex with his wife. In the midst of things,
his hand, on which surgeons have spent three hours trying to reconnect nerves and ten-
dons, starts bleeding. Deprived of his illusory phallus, Strickland can no longer perform:
when his wife remarks on his bleeding hand, Strickland orders her to be quiet so he can
finish up. Yet having lost the symbolic phallus, the signifier of jouissance (Écrits 697),
the sexual act becomes coitus interruptus: Strickland seems unable to reach his climax,
and jouissance eludes him. As Bruce Fink notes, castration implies the sacrifice of jouis-
sance, the “loss of gratification” involving another person (66). And so Strickland desper-
ately seeks an imaginary phallus, an image or imago of his lost organ, to make up for the
experience of castration. He finds one when that same day he buys a Cadillac, an unmis-
takable sign of male potency and conventional notions of masculinity. In its elongated
shape, especially its front, the Cadillac functions as an image of his lost penis, an illusory
mirror image in which Strickland hopes to find a reflection of his lost manhood, earlier
represented by the phallic appendages of his fingers. Later on, the car is severely dam-
aged: during the escape operation, Giles accidentally knocks it with the laundry van, per-
forming yet another miniature act of castration.
The most explicit act of castration, however, takes place at the hands of Gen-
eral Hoyt, father figure and Strickland’s superior in the military. General Hoyt appar-
ently stands for the ­Name-of-the-Father, the figure of authority who lays down the law
(although he will later prove to be the obscene anal father, who sees himself as beyond
the law). In an early phone conversation, shortly after the loss of the Amphibian, the
General tells Strickland, “You can get it done; you’re going to get it done, for me, son, for
me.” This is the demanding father, gently pressing his point but making it clear that a son
should not disappoint his father. During the General’s subsequent visit to the facility, the
demanding father becomes the punitive and castrating father. At the start of their inter-
view, Strickland tries to make excuses for not having recovered the “asset” yet: “A man
is faithful, loyal, efficient, all his life, and he is useful, and he expects […] he has some
expectations in return. And then he fails, once, only once. What does that make him?
Does that make him a failure? When is a man done? Proving himself, Sir? A good man.
A decent man—.” This sounds like a child begging his father for forgiveness. Strickland
looks down during part of this speech, then leans forward, extending his arms as if in an
appeal to the father’s mercy. The repetition of the word “man” in his speech points to the
arrival of Strickland’s psychosis. Linguistic disturbances are a key sign of psychosis for
Lacan, and in this repetitive, not fully grammatical speech, Strickland seems to be losing
his apparent, albeit tenuous, grip on the signifying chain and system of signification. But,
as in the previous castrating incident, this is confirmed by what comes next.
And what comes next is castration as punishment by the Father. General Hoyt
observes that all this talk of decency is sheer nonsense, that “we sell it because we don’t
use it.” If Strickland fails to recover the “asset,” General Hoyt continues, Strickland will
have to be sacrificed: “You’ll be lost to civilization and you’ll be unborn, unmade, and
undone.” Going even further than castration, the father denies the son the act of birth, for
the implication is that Strickland will not only lose his position as head of Occam but also
be executed as punishment for his failures. In Freudian and Lacanian analysis, the father
castrates when he steps in and imposes rules and regulations. This is generally a good,
or at least useful, development that structures and organizes the boy’s sexuality. General
Hoyt, however, is not the benign, Oedipal father but the domineering, monstrous father
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  77

whose demands have no limits. Such an abusively authoritarian father “acts unilaterally
toward his son, punishing, for example, without listening to the son’s possible reasons
for having behaved the way he behaved” (Fink 99). As the unbridled, monstrous father,
General Hoyt goes beyond the limits of the law and castrates the son, a castration that is
not useful but destructive. It kills off the symbolic system of meaning he had previously
tried to instate (decency, manliness, the American dream) by asserting that this system is
just an illusion, an export, rather than the actual code of conduct of the military. And by
doing so, the Father triggers the son’s psychotic break.
Signs of psychosis emerge during the ensuing mirror scene. After this second expe-
rience of castration, Strickland rushes into the bathroom, anxiously swallows some tab-
lets, and nearly chokes. He looks at his two ­re-attached fingers, now black and festering,
thereby establishing a connection between the two acts of castration. When he finally
sees his reflection in the bathroom mirror, Strickland does not recognize his own imago.
He addresses his specular counterpart in the second person, as an other: “36 hours, 36
hours. Hello, that’s what you do. You deliver, right? Right?!” This is the mirror stage gone
wrong: if the mirror stage is essential for the healthy formation of the ego, Strickland
appears alienated from his specular self. He is fragmented, literally and symbolically, and
remains so when he fails to recognize his own imago. For Lacan, a split structure between
the ego and the other is unavoidably present in every individual (Écrits 357). The problem
here is that this “other” is rather the Other with an ­upper-case “O,” the truly unknown
that is impossible to assimilate into the self as totalized body image normally resulting
from the mirror stage.
Lacan, like Freud, sees the failure of the paternal function—or what Lacan calls fore-
closure (Écrits 479)—as the origin of psychosis. Since all meaning and symbolization
derive from the father function, when the paternal metaphor fails or has never been fully
established, psychosis occurs. This is what Lacan calls foreclosure (Écrits 479). And thus,
in The Shape of Water, the failure of the paternal function to establish the equitable law
of the symbolic pushes Strickland over the edge. General Hoyt shatters the ideology on
which Strickland’s ego had been built: his ideas of masculinity, decency, and patriotism.
To put it in linguistic terms, as Lacan does, the chain of signifiers on which Strickland
operates (­man-decency-America-Cadillac-picket-fenced house in the suburbs) is found
faulty. By the end of the movie, the severance of these links triggers Strickland’s psycho-
sis. The symbolic chain collapses, and his former notions about life and manhood cannot
be ­re-integrated into any system of meaning. Lacan calls that which prevents the sym-
bolic chain from collapsing the point de capiton, or anchoring point, in which “the sig-
nified and the signifier are knotted together” (Seminar III, 268). For Lacan, the absence
of a minimum number of these points of attachment results in psychosis, and indeed the
point de capiton is shown to be clearly inoperant for Strickland after his encounter with
General Hoyt.
Strickland’s psychosis leads to ­self-amputation next. In his frantic search for the
Amphibian, Strickland visits Zelda’s home, and as he threatens her, Strickland deludes
himself into believing that he is a modern Samson. Just as the biblical Samson recov-
ered his strength and took revenge on the Philistines, Strickland believes that he too will
obtain retribution and “bring this part of the temple down upon our heads.” Adding to
my argument that the film blurs definitions of ability, disability, and impairment, Strick-
land openly identifies with a disabled character: Samson is blinded by the Philistines, who
pluck out his eyes, and castrated by Delilah, who cuts his hair. This is Strickland’s role
78   The Body in Theory

model and inspiration, his imago, at such a moment of crisis. For Lacan, delusion and
­self-amputation are some of the manifestations of psychosis: because the psychotic indi-
vidual refuses symbolic castration, he is prone to have fantasies and dreams about dis-
memberment and occasionally to enact them (Lacan Seminar I, 58–59). In the middle of
his speech on Samson and the Philistines, Strickland painfully pulls off his two ­re-attached
fingers. As he throws them onto the carpet, they create bathos by landing under Zelda’s TV
set. Strickland, thus, actuates the symbolic castration perpetrated by the Father; his fin-
gers/phallus are once more detached, severed, and flying across the scene.
The Shape of Water works to disrupt the binary between able and disabled identity,
between able and disabled bodies. Even the fact that limbs can be attached, detached, and
­re-attached shows how arbitrary these categories are. The “normal” body is revealed as
bounded and partial; the disabled are shown as whole and coordinated; and the not phys-
ically impaired but “different” are presented as socially disabled due to their race, nation-
ality, or sexuality. Not only are categories highly unstable, but in Del Toro’s universe, they
are also senseless. This is why I have been arguing that The Shape of Water questions the
dominant culture of ableism and opens up new avenues for cultural representations of
the body. My reading shows how the film seems to problematize the Lacanian symbolic
as an inherently ableist establishment. But it also reveals the uses of ­Lacanian-informed
analyses, for in its focus on the body, this approach, working alongside constructivist and
other views, can deepen our understanding of cultural representations of disability in the
­twenty-first century.

Notes
1. In contrast, the more enlightened Giles gasps “He’s beautiful!” upon first seeing the Amphibian. This
shows again the contrast between Strickland’s and Elisa’s groups of allies and the blurring of notions of able/
disabled.
2. A historical, rather than psychoanalytical, reading of monstrosity is provided by Rosemarie
­Garland-Thomson. For ­Garland-Thomson, around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a cul-
tural shift in the way extraordinary bodies were regarded: from awe and wonder to shock and horror (Freak-
ery, 2–3). She connects this change with the rise of modernity, a reading that would also apply to The Shape of
Water in its emphasis on technological development and urban expansion. For other, complementary studies
of monstrosity, see Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory and Jay Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric.
3. As noted above, the “asset” is the highly depersonalized term regularly used by Strickland and other
Occam authorities to refer to the Amphibian. This term suggests that the creature is regarded as a commodity
in the capitalist market rather than as a human being.
4. I am borrowing the term “hegemony of normalcy” from Davis. In Enforcing Normalcy, Davis argues that,
in the eighteenth century, the novel was a way of surveying and policing the body, thereby helping to consol-
idate the “hegemony of normalcy” (44). My argument differs from Davis’s in that I examine how one of the
­twenty-first-century’s dominant genres, film, can act in ways to break such hegemony as well as surely rein-
forcing it in other cases.

Works Cited
Davis, Lennard J., editor. The Disability Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006.
_____. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995.
Del Toro, Guillermo, director. The Shape of Water. Bull Productions, 2017.
Evans, David. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University
Press, 1999.
­Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and
Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997.
 Lacan, Film, and the Disabled Body (Cano)  79

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–54: Translated by John For-
rester, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–56. Translated by Russell Grigg, Routledge,
1993.
Linton, Simi. “Reassigning Meaning.” Davis, pp. 161–72.
Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.” Davis, pp. 205–16.
Shakespeare, Tom. “The Social Model of Disability.” Davis, pp. 197–204.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Edited by Marilyn Butler, Oxford University Press,
2008.
Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory. From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” Davis,
pp. 173–83.
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm
of Violence in Modern Art
Géricault, Dix, and Salomon
Michiko Oki

This paper aims to explore the image of the hunched posture, which recurrently
appears in the works of Théodore Géricault, Otto Dix, and Charlotte Salomon, and to con-
ceptualize it as a visual paradigm that signals the violence of normative power found in
contemporary biopolitics as defined by Michel Foucault. I will investigate the significance
of the hunched posture in the discourse of the body in modernity, particularly in relation
to fragmentation and normalization in social and ­art-historical contexts. Through this
analysis, I seek to articulate the power of the hunched posture to question upright figures
as the normalized image of the human being fostered by biopolitical administration.
Working in turbulent times from the French Revolution to the Restoration, Géri-
cault’s motifs are expressed in a range of figures from male nudes, warriors, corpses, and
bodies with severed limbs to the insane. Those figures mark the woundedness, failure,
and deprivation of the canonical image of a socially formulated body, all at the culmina-
tion of colonial projects and at the transition from sovereign power to state power. Dix, a
returning soldier wounded in the First World War, painted people living on the fringes of
society such as veteran cripples, prostitutes, dancers, and circus performers in the deca-
dent reality of postwar Germany. After Dix was expelled from the academy by the Nazis,
these figures of people living on the fringes were later transferred to his depictions of
hunched saints and Christ’s Passion. And, finally, Salomon created an autobiographical
picture book Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel during her life as a refugee in the South
of France before her death in Auschwitz. In this autobiographical work, the difficulties of
her life as a German Jewish woman living throughout the 1930s and ’40s are desperately
illustrated, involving as well the chains of suicide in her family.
In their works, hunched figures appear among bodies in various violent circum-
stances, especially among those who are devastated from within by the loss of physi-
cal and psychological reality, a loss produced by a collective orchestration of violence
over human life in modernity. Collectively, these three artists’ representations of dev-
astated hunched figures embody the crucial phases of the development of the modern
state. They inscribe the time when sovereign power is increasingly transformed into a
dispersed mode of power in biopolitical form, when violence takes shape more and more
as an invisible power that normalizes and controls the human body.

80
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  81

Hunching Against Uprightness: The Normalization of the Body

in Modernity
The body has become a significant topic in cultural studies as well as in art history
now that the work of Foucault has been widely applied in the humanities, especially his
idea of the “docile body” proposed in Discipline and Punish and subsequently elaborated
with the idea of biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Thanks to the
inclusion of Foucauldian concepts into art history, the issue of the body is now discussed
as a social and political field necessarily intertwined with the way in which the body is
visualized and represented (Mirozoeff 9).
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault defines biopolitical power
as a modern form of power that, from the seventeenth century onward, functions less
as a system of punishment or prohibition than as techniques of normalization and con-
trol that go well beyond the state as such (133–54). Such power is exercised in everyday
life through the disciplining and normalizing of bodies, perceptions, and discourses. Its
aim is to create manageable, productive subjects and to fashion them as objects of use.
Here power is diffused, its substance is masked, and its violent intervention in human
life becomes too opaque to identify. As power becomes omnipresent and invisible, the
place of violence also becomes ubiquitous and more and more difficult to detect, since
it takes shape as the many and varied shades of the norm. The omnipotence of violence
in the shape of the norm is one of the prominent characteristics of the modern state
after the seventeenth century. Sovereign power is transformed into biopower, and the
place of power and violence shifts from the extreme states of warfare and death to the
physical and psychological dimensions of everyday life. These are the issues at stake in
the contemporary Western intellectual, cultural, and artistic contexts since Foucault’s
theorization of biopolitics has enlightened our perception of the body. In this context,
upright human figures appear as a prototype of the biopolitical power exercised over
the human body, and the hunched posture emerges as a counter figure ripe for oppres-
sion. The posture of hunching becomes an awkward affront to the upright bipedal fig-
ure when uprightness is positioned as the canonical (or orthopedically correct) image of
a human being. It appears as a posture symbolic of laziness, inaction, or unhealthiness
as against the discipline of a healthy, productive, upright body. It suggests a collapse of
human power, reminding us of our obscure resemblance to apes. In the process of nor-
malizing the human body and life within modernity, the hunchback occupies a peculiar
space, which designates something not quite human but also not quite nonhuman. It is a
space where several creatures coexist and various possible expressions of the human fig-
ure surface.
With the rise of taxonomy and statistics, which aim to approach people as popula-
tion, bipedalism becomes a necessary condition of the human figure not only for biologi-
cal reasons but also for differentiating human culture from that of animals. The discourse
of bipedalism as opposed to quadrupedalism, in which the former is supposed to have
evolved out of the latter, was essential in order to determine the criteria of how humans
should look. This evolutionary scenario by which all creatures head towards full human-
ity perpetually requires the depiction of a canonical human figure. The human figure
must be shown as distinctly different from all other creatures but also partially connected
to them. When a nearly complete skeleton of an extinct species of genus homo, Neander-
thal, was discovered in 1908, it immediately provoked an active argument in the field of
82   The Body in Theory

prehistoric archaeology. Since it was neither ape nor homo sapiens, evolutionists hoped
they had found the “missing link” between them in this unknown species of Neanderthal,
which looks slightly less than human. French paleontologist Marcellin Boule, who first
analyzed the Neanderthal skeleton and reconstructed the specimen, depicted it as having
“a less perfect bipedal or upright carriage than in modern Man” (252).1 As seen in the case
of the discovery of the Neanderthal, the bodily feature of the spinal curve and its accom-
panying hunched posture were employed to differentiate contemporary human beings
from other hominine creatures.2 The production of the subsidiary category of nonhuman
was actively played out in the figure of the hunchback, which, in turn, determined how
contemporary humans should appear.
The hunched posture also marks the transition of the human psyche to the disem-
bodied sphere of intelligence. For Sigmund Freud, the human’s adoption of an upright
position plays a role in the origin of repression, which, in turn, paves the way to civiliza-
tion. Prior to elaborating his theory of repression, first in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess in
1897 and later in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud conceived that something organic
played a role in the psychological mechanism of repression (Civilization 99–100). He
claims that the origin of repression is related to the diminution of olfactory stimuli pro-
duced by the upright bipedalism. As the human acquires an erect posture, his nose is dis-
tanced from the sexual zone and detached from olfactory stimuli involving the smell of
excreta. This process of acquiring an erect posture turns the value of excreta as a part of
his own body into disgust, which, in turn, gives birth to intellectual development (Com-
plete Letters 280). Upright physical movement advanced the civilizing process by segre-
gating the facial zone, where olfactory, oral, and visual senses are organized, from the
sexual zone. The movement of bodily elevation caused a fragmentation of sexuality that
brought about a psychological charge of guilt and shame, thus adding a moral dimen-
sion to the intellectual process of human development. At the same time, it provoked a
desire for purification and cleanliness—that is, a desire to transcend the physical dimen-
sion of the human body. Georges Bataille’s bizarre idea of the solar anus and the pineal
eye reaching towards the sun “as erect as a penis” would uniquely illuminate what upright
movement brings about on the fringes of repression in psychoanalytical terms (75).

Muselmann and Hunchback

In the modern process of normalizing the body, the hunched posture is employed to
justify the biological, psychological, and ideological necessity of the upright human fig-
ure. Thus, the ­well-disciplined upright body appears as the other side of the drowning
hunched figure. This complicit relationship was most tactically materialized in Nazism,
the extreme formation of sovereign power under a totalized biopolitical administration.
Foucault defines Nazism as the most immediate combination of the disciplinary power
of biopolitics and the fantasies of the blood myth. Under this administration, the human
body was reduced to the biological existence of the population, radically exposed to a
political field of discipline and domination (History of Sexuality 149–50).
It is not a coincidence that the ­well-disciplined upright body, most blatantly seen
in visual works or films produced in the Nazi era such as Triumph of the Will (1934) or
Olympia (1938), appears alongside the ­so-called Muselmann in the concentration and
extermination camp. Muselmann was the term used by fellow prisoners in the camp to
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  83

refer to those who were physically and mentally debilitated by malnutrition or illness and
who became ­absent-minded, bending over as if in Muslim worship. Muselmann is the
most radical manifestation of “bare life” in an extreme realization of the biopolitical par-
adigm, to which all who live in contemporary society are potentially exposed in one way
or another (Agamben 85). Erik Vogt precisely states the increasing need to cite the camp
in contemporary intellectual practices: “the inhabitant of Nazi concentration camps is
not the other to modern society, but its dark symbol” (79). In a sense, the hunchback is
an uncanny double of the normalized upright human figure, a double that makes visible
the invisible violence of the norm. This symbolic dimension exemplified by the hunched
existence of Muselmann informs my attempt to conceptualize the hunchback as a visual
paradigm that signals the violence of contemporary biopolitics. This visual paradigm is
explored in particular in my discussion of Salomon, whose work and life as a victim of
the camp embody the height of biopolitical violence.

Fragmented Bodies in Modern Art

In modernity, the process of fragmenting and dehumanizing the body is the con-
dition for the reformation of the human body and human life as one biological contin-
uum and as a utilitarian unit of labor. The organic totality of the body, the ideal body
as conceived throughout ancient Greece to the Renaissance and then to the Classical
period, has broken down. The idea that the human body is never complete and harmo-
nious but a disjunctured entity has become fundamental to this new discourse. In fact,
art historians such as Linda Nochlin have contextualized the loss of the totality and the
fragmentation of the human body as part of the process of modernity. In this discourse,
the breakdown of the conventional approach to the representation of the body has been
given both a negative and a positive narrative in terms of actual bodily mutilation and
the body’s social and psychological implications (23). From the actual decapitation of the
king during the French Revolution to the experience of disintegration in the fluid real-
ity of modern life under capitalism, fragmentation signifies revolutionary strategies in
both political and artistic spheres. This fragmentation can be most evidently seen in the
representation of devastated bodies in the works of Géricault and Dix, as I will discuss
later.
The body in modernity carries the stigma of castration and wounding resulting from
historical trauma. At the same time, the disintegrated body serves as a foundation for the
new understanding of the unified body, which can be seen in ­avant-garde movements in
general such as Surrealism, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism. The artists involved
in these movements attempted to “recover” the lost totality of the human body through
a classical aesthetic after the First World War, which literally fragmented and destroyed
human bodies on an unprecedented scale through the use of new technologies. These art
movements sought new understandings of the body in fragmentation and in the inven-
tion of new forms of synthesis to incorporate abnormal bodies (­Carden-Coyne 31–32).
In this context of modern art, which deconstructs/reconstructs the body in a dia-
lectical tension, I explore the allegorical figure of the hunchback as one critical paradigm
of the body in modernity, for it interrupts the schema of the upright body as an elevating
biopolitical norm. In the following sections, I will investigate the figure of the hunchback
in an analysis of paintings by Géricault, Dix, and Salomon, an analysis whose aim is to
84   The Body in Theory

illuminate the violence of a scheme of uprightness that perpetually neglects the vulnera-
ble physical reality of the human being.

Théodore Géricault at the Wreck of the Enlightenment

In Géricault’s painting Le Naufragé (1817–1818), known as a study for Le Radeau de la
Méduse (1818–1819), a naked man exhibiting an enormous sense of fatigue is just about to
emerge from the boiling sea. His muscular body is so tense that the flesh appears to ripple
and swell, as if it could burst open the next moment. His hunched torso is an exaggerated
representation of heaving muscle distinct from the rest of the body, which is correctly
articulated. The muscle is strangely animated, as if it were going to overcome his whole
body. In contrast to the roughness of the sea and the rippling of his muscles, he embod-
ies a great sense of exhaustion and resignation, clambering over the rock to hold onto
it. Here there is neither the heroic atmosphere of survival nor human victory over the
wild force of nature. There is only an excess of energy for which there is no outlet, gradu-
ally taking over his masculine body. This peculiar juxtaposition of drowning fatigue and
excessive energy is typical of the hunched figures appearing throughout Géricault’s figu-
rative paintings.
Throughout his career, Géricault worked with great enthusiasm on the representa-
tion of the male body, mostly in the nude, in an anatomical precision reminiscent of the
neoclassical style. Among his paintings are quite a few hunched or bent figures whose
torsos are mostly covered by excessive muscle. In the series of male nudes Académie
d’Homme (1816–1817), some male figures are depicted in a powerfully masculine hunched
posture with their spines curved flexibly, figures that apparently look like those well
trained ideal male bodies inspired by classical sculptures. These masculine hunched men
also appear in works such as Paysage à l’Aqueduc (Le Soir) (1818) and Scène de Déluge
(1812), one of the series of shipwreck pictures along with Le Naufragé.
All of these hunched postures of masculine men culminate in Géricault’s master-
piece, Le Radeau de la Méduse. As is well known, it depicts the nightmarish scene of
survival after the shipwreck of the Méduse, which sailed from Rochefort, France, for
Senegal in 1816. It was a disaster often ascribed to the corruption and incompetence of
the restored French monarchy and its colonial project. In this picture is the figure of a
man that crystalizes the imagery of the hunched figure appearing throughout Géricault’s
paintings. At the end of the row of bodies diagonally orchestrating a dramaturgy of sur-
vival in a second of emotional sublimation is one man sitting hunched and facing oppo-
site the man who is the focal point and who is waving towards a distant ship. Everyone
except this hunched man is lost in emotional upheaval and the hope for survival. The
hunched man, on the other hand, stares into the air indifferently, isolated from the drama
of despair with a sense of silent but profound anger.
The intensity of Le Radeau de la Méduse is largely due to two focal points: the gaze of
the hunched man and the back of the man waving towards the ship. Here a sharp contrast
between ­self-referential distanciation and oblivious absorption plays a part in composing
the picture. Evidently Géricault’s intention was to endow this hunched man with a sig-
nificant role. The mass of people on the raft makes an ensemble, weaving a narrative of a
disastrous event that Géricault endeavored to imagine by interviewing survivors, sketch-
ing corpses in the hospital, and studying severed limbs and heads at the asylum. But, with
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  85

his angry and fatigued detachment from his surroundings, the hunched man breaks into
the narrative of the disastrous shipwreck of the Méduse, undoing the structural order that
holds together the readability of the scene. The hunched man is sitting in the middle of
decomposition, from which the last vestiges of the vital force left on the raft are squeezed
upward through the ascending piles of bodies to the waving man. As if he were counter-
ing the waving man, who embodies the force of survival, he has his back turned to the
roaring energy of life, an ultimate state of being among those who are drowning. Here
again drowning fatigue and excessive energy coincide just as they do in Le Naufragé in
the figure of a hunched man.
As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby argues, Le Radeau de la Méduse embodies a complex
facet of France’s body politic built around colonialism at that time. Among passengers
taken on the raft, the majority were soldiers who were mostly the remnants of the Revo-
lutionary army of citizen soldiers. These soldiers who joined the colonial regiments were
poor, uneducated, criminal, or foreign, and thus they were considered “the dregs of the
French army” and morally degraded (172). Because of this way of viewing them, the sol-
diers sent to France’s colonies were not considered as representatives of their country
but as a potential threat that had to be exiled from it. By the time of the shipwreck of the
Méduse, rather than a conquest of civilization over savage, the colonies represent “aliens,”
i.e., nonhumans as opposed to humans. The significance of the colonies was extended
from the geographical “outside” of black slaves to a cultural/social “outside” of degraded
soldiers as well as criminals, foreigners, and political prisoners. These colonial “aliens”
needed to be exiled not only from home but also from mankind in order for French cit-
izens to secure their own humanity, and this preservation of their own humanity was
accomplished by generating the inhuman within themselves and excluding it as “alien.”
The social disorder caused by the revolutionary upheavals exposed a mechanism for
maintaining the modern state, a mechanism founded on the generation of a norm. Thus,
the passengers on the raft are a crystallization of a complex political agenda reflecting
the ­self-interest of the restored monarchy and a ­body-politic constructed on a system of
inclusion/exclusion supported by colonial projects.
As is well known, later in his career Géricault drew a number of severed limbs and
heads as well as portraits of the insane. In these motifs, he explored representations of the
body detached from any dignified moral posture that guarantees a normative social face.
His turn to the nonhuman quality of the human body is significant. On the one hand, Le
Radeau de la Méduse shows his democratic vision to support society’s most marginalized
bodies through his idealized representation of a group of people excluded from a norma-
tive society, fighting for their survival and claiming visibility for their existence.3 On the
other hand, through the suspension and lassitude accumulated in the hunched man, Le
Radeau de la Méduse shows Géricault’s increasing curiosity about a place where identity
construction through body image fails.
As Norman Bryson argues, the fatigue perpetuated in Géricault’s male figures is an
allegorical expression of the breakdown of masculinity that structures Western political
thought as it culminated in the Enlightenment and subsequently became aligned with the
colonial project (228–59). Géricault’s hunched postures surface precisely in the midst of
masculine male bodies that rule the world. They signal a place where the enlarged mas-
culinity of humanism, of the Enlightenment, replaces the sovereignty of a king with the
white male as a normative biological category upon which mankind is classified. Géri-
cault’s hunched figures mark a shift from the violent exploitation of another’s life to one’s
86   The Body in Theory

own, from a force capable of conquering the savage “other” with the power of civiliza-
tion to a force capable of generating the “other” within oneself. In Géricault’s work, the
hunched posture foreshadows the place of dehumanization at the turn of the eighteenth
century, when people were potentially inserted into a domain where their bodies were
normalized and colonized by the force of biopower.

Otto Dix in the Aftermath of the First World War

The ­w ell-known characters of Otto Dix’s paintings—sailors, circus performers,
dancers, prostitutes, soldiers in the battlefield, veterans, and cripples on the street—
are all extremely deformed, and among these characters on the fringe, hunched figures
appear. They show in a comical and satirical manner the ugliness, misery, and decadence
of human bodies whose humanity is stripped away in German society in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the First World War. Dix’s materialist curiosity regarding a fundamen-
tal uncanniness in human beings is largely drawn from his experience of the First World
War, in which he served as a ­non-commissioned officer of a machine gun unit.
In Prager Straße (1920), a hunched man sitting on the street looks more like a puppet
than a human with his hollow eyes and patchwork body of prosthetic wooden limbs. His
stopgap limbs made out of pieces of wood are miserably primitive, almost of no practical
use. In the foreground, a man in a clean suit with a bowler hat is swaggering about, acting
­ten-feet tall, but he has no lower half of his body. He sits on a wheeled board with sticks
in his hands that he uses to propel himself forward. Behind him, partial bodies of manne-
quins displayed in the ­show-window wear beauty aids such as corsets and bust improv-
ers—techniques of disciplinary intervention in the female body to achieve an upright
torso—oddly juxtaposed with the hunched, castrated male body.
As a returning wounded soldier from the First World War, Dix himself was very
much aware of the veteran’s ambiguous position as the site of contemporary neurosis in
which social fear is accumulated. Spectacle and simulacrum are generated around social
fear of castration and dehumanization, which is politically malleable in the face of the
normalization of human life and body (Fox 255–56). Even the most horrific experience
of psychological and physical pain can be objectified into a commodity for display. It can
be used for identity construction as a patriotic ­self-sacrifice or simply put up for sale as a
spectacle of strange, hybrid creatures that are half object and half human. Dix’s humor-
ous depiction of the politics of shame in Prager Straße is also explicit in Die Kriegeskrüp-
pel (1920) and Der Streichholzhändler I (1920). In these images, he portrays tragicomically
how the veterans’ empty pride remained in their broken bodies.
From the 1930s and throughout the 1940s, particularly after being dismissed by the
Nazis from the Dresden Art Academy, Dix recurrently painted the motifs of Death, the
Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Saint Christopher in strong allegorical tones. Hunched
figures appear throughout those paintings. For example, Triumph des Todes (1934) is a
collage of various figures such as the soldier, the war cripple, the commercial sex worker,
and the hunched old woman. In the center, Death is wearing a crown and wielding a huge
scythe as if he were going to mow down the protagonists. A golden light with blooming
flowers and a bird’s nest containing eggs warmly illuminate the area in the foreground,
where young lovers are in sexual ecstasy and a baby is crawling. Next to the crawling baby
is an old, hunched woman digging in the ground, perhaps to plant something or to dig a
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  87

grave. A blind war cripple without legs is looking up towards the image of Death, guided
by a barking dog next to him. There is a sense of circular movement among these protag-
onists as if life and death were perpetually penetrating each other in a Möbius ­strip–like
manner. Here the hunched figures sprawl on the threshold between life and death, dis-
turbing its equilibrium.
In Die Sieben Todsünden (1933), the hunched, old woman transforms into a witch
on whose bent back a little boy is sitting, wearing a ­mask-like pale face that obviously
alludes to Hitler. According to Dix’s notes on this painting, the witch represents Ava-
rice, who carries the whole theater of the other six figures of sin on her hunched back
(Hartley 208–09). The iconography of Die Sieben Todsünden evolved into Die Versuchung
des Heiligen Antonius (1937) and Die Versuchung des Heiligen Antoniu II (1940). In these
paintings, the image of the hunched witch in Die Sieben Todsünden is replaced by Saint
Anthony’s enduring supernatural biblical temptation during his ascetic life in the des-
ert. On his hunched back, he carries hallucinatory, monstrous creatures representing his
earthly desires and fears in the ultimate state of physical debilitation.
In Der Heilige Christophorus I (1938)–VI (1944), Dix recurrently depicts the biblical
story of Saint Christopher when he takes a little Christ child on his back across the river.
As he walks, the river swells, and the little Christ child gets heavier and heavier until
Saint Christopher notices that this little child is someone gravid with importance. The
little Christ child is supremely heavy because he carries sins from the entire world, and
Saint Christopher excessively hunches in order to carry such a heavy entity. In his later
years, Dix started to draw the passion of Christ in an emphatic expressionist style such as
Ecce Homo III (1949) and Kreuztragung (1960). Saint Christopher, who was bending over
to carry a heavy little Christ, is now Christ himself, who is carrying a heavy cross on his
hunched back. Looking closely at how Dix depicts the little Christ on Saint Christopher’s
back, we can see the consistent narrative that he attributes to the hunched figures: his
depiction of Christ, here, looks dominant and authoritarian rather than divine and mer-
ciful. Furthermore, Saint Christopher’s facial expression has taken on a look of discom-
fort, as if he were annoyed by having to carry a passenger on his back, rather than one of
grateful epiphanic astonishment.
Accused of being a “degenerate artist” in his later career, Dix cloaked his social sat-
ire in religious garments, marking a parallel among the social outcast, including the war
victim, a saint’s martyrdom, and Christ’s Calvary. In Dix’s work, the place where the
hunched posture appears is consistently related to the dominance of power under which
someone’s life becomes necessarily hunched both in a political and in a religious system.
Dix worked on the issue of violence more and more allegorically after the Nazis came to
power and turned their symbolic power into actual violence. Thus, from Triumph des
Todes (1934) to Der Heilige Christophorus VI (1944), a swastika appears as a symbol of
power in the shape of those figures sitting on someone’s hunched back with their limbs
spread—Death, Hitler, Woman, and even Christ, who are eventually led to the cross. Far
from affirming religion in these shifting figures sitting on a hunched back, Dix consis-
tently criticizes the authoritarian politics that exercised oppressive power on human life
in his time. He traces this form of politics back to the cross, the symbol of Christianity
now swollen into a gigantic emblem of power systematically overlaid on people’s lives.
This power, imposing notions of sin and guilt, evolves into techniques of discipline and
punishment fundamental to modern biopolitical power. The hunched figures in Dix’s
work remind us of a persistent recurrence of the grotesque physical reality that cannot
88   The Body in Theory

be transformed into the canonical upright human figure—a physical existence particu-
larly exposed in the postwar social confusion in Germany throughout the first half of the
twentieth century.

Charlotte Salomon at the Rise of the Nazis

In the last image of her autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?:
Ein Singspiel (1941–1942), Salomon painted herself sitting with her back to us, engaged
in drawing a landscape by the sea. On her hunched back appear dominantly inscribed
the words “Leben oder Theater.” She seems unaware of the inscription, as if she were like
one of the condemned people in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony on whose backs the particu-
lar law each one has violated is inscribed by a horrific machine of execution. Throughout
Leben? oder Theater?, the hunched posture appears on all of the major protagonists of the
story including this one, who carries the title of the work on her back.
Salomon created the book entitled Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel in 1941 during
her stay in the South of France as a refugee escaping from ­Nazi-occupied Berlin. It is a
picture book comprised of 769 autobiographical gouache paintings, which are divided
into three sections: a Prelude, a Main Section, and an Epilogue. The paintings are accom-
panied by corresponding narratives, dialogues, lyrics, or suggestions of musical melo-
dies. As a whole, it is presented like a storyboard for an operatic performance. Images are
painted in an expressionist style, and their composition is in the manner of a comic strip.
The images and texts describe factual scenes from Salomon’s public and private lives as
well as her own psychological visions. They deal mainly with the difficulties in family
relationships, love affairs, and the position of German Jews in the immediate aftermath
of the rise of the National Socialists to power. Salomon’s struggle against the suicidal ten-
dency in her family is most evident.4 In contrast to the brightness of southern France full
of sun and sea, where she worked intensely on the book, a sense of distress and anger
rings out from the series. Her rough expressionist style and fragmented pictorial compo-
sition suggest an impending emergency, as if she had to make an urgent statement in the
face of the injustice of her precarious life.
In the course of Salomon’s narrative reconstruction of her life, the hunched pos-
ture repeatedly appears in the figuration of the three protagonists, particularly in the
scene related to death and creation: Salomon herself, engaged in painting; Salomon’s
grandmother, obsessed with fear at the suicides perpetuated in her family; and her lover
Alfred Wolfsohn, Salomon’s stepmother’s German Jewish voice trainer, absorbed in the
creation of operatic works. For instance, in the Prelude Section, as inscribed in the text
on the images, the grandmother is contemplating how full of suicide her tragic life has
been, her brother killing himself first, followed by her mother and then her two daugh-
ters (JHM no. 4254, 4300).5 As her thinking tragically unfolds, she hunches her shoulders
and clasps her hand to her head. In another image from the Epilogue, Salomon is taking
care of her grandmother, who already had attempted suicide several times by then (JHM
no. 4867, 4868). Here the hunched figure is Salomon herself, who had just found out
through her grandfather about the truth of her mother’s death. In the Epilogue section,
most of the paintings are expressed in rough, violent brushstrokes without any detail,
showing a sense of despair and anger. A major part of the Epilogue concerns her grand-
mother’s agony in fighting against her own suicidal impulses. In one of the scenes in
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  89

which Salomon takes care of her grandmother, Salomon sits beside the bed, and her fig-
ure appears as nothing but a colored shadow with her back severely arched (JHM no.
4867, 4868). Several images later, her grandmother has killed herself by jumping out of
the window.
While Salomon’s grandmother bends over out of her anxiety and her obsession with
death, Wolfsohn and Salomon hunch over in their creative activities. Alfred Wolfsohn,
who appears under the name Amadeus Daberlohn, is depicted writing a manuscript in
the Main Section (JHM no. 4685, 4693). As he becomes more absorbed in his writing,
he starts to hunch over more and more. Salomon herself also appears hunched when she
is intensely engaged in painting (JHM no. 4319, 4348, 4351, 4354, 4599, 4600, 4708). In
Salomon’s work the hunched figures reflect the extreme state of the human psyche both
when facing death and when absorbed in creation. Here we can see her artistic attempt
to displace and transform her suffering into the form of a narrative structure. She par-
ticularly explores the therapeutic and creative effect of the inhuman dimension of the
human manifesting itself in extreme experiences such as the loss of her family, the sui-
cidal impulse that haunts her kin, and the worsening situation of Nazi violence.
Behind Salomon’s hunched figures are Wolfsohn’s theories. Wolfsohn plays an espe-
cially profound role in Salomon’s artistic development, and, in a sense, Leben? oder The-
ater?: Ein Singspiel is an application of his theory of voice.6 Wolfsohn was a pioneer in the
realms of voice research and training, exploring the possibilities of the human voice not
only as an instrument of theatrical and artistic expression but also as psychic develop-
ment and therapy. He was horrified and fascinated by his experience of hearing the cries
of dying soldiers during the First World War as well as the voices broadcast from else-
where in Hitler’s Berlin. Drawing on this aural experience, he envisioned the nature and
possibilities of the voice as an embodiment of a ­non-linguistic, inhuman dimension in
the human being that is able to reach the unconscious and extend the psychic capacity to
deal with the fear and trauma caused by radical exposure to violent circumstances.7
Paul Newham, himself a practitioner of Wolfsohn’s method, notes that Wolfsohn’s
method is particularly underpinned by Jung’s concept of “shadow,” which points to “the
darker and ­down-pointing part of the personality” (“Jung and Alfred Wolfsohn” 329). It
reveals what is below the social face: the animalistic/animistic state of the human being.
Having access to this “shadow” is a way to sublimate the experience of death into a source
of expressive energy able to revitalize life. Most importantly, for Wolfsohn, “shadow”
appears mediated by “a living corpse” such as he himself had witnessed and experienced
in the extremity of war (325). This “shadow,” this human yet nonhuman living corpse to
which Wolfsohn was exposed in the war (perhaps it appeared to him something like the
Muselmann), lurks in Salomon’s work as the hunched figures of Wolfsohn, of herself in
the act of expression, and of her grandmother facing her fear of death.
In 1939, Salomon escaped to the South of France; subsequently in 1943, she was sent
to Auschwitz and gassed to death on the day of her arrival. Ironically, the hunched figures
in Salomon’s work, which were inspired by Wolfsohn’s creative, therapeutic, “good” living
corpses, end up prefiguring the systematic appearance of their own darkest side: the help-
less, speechless, drowning hunched figure of the Muselmann in the camp. The tremen-
dous capacity of the inhuman within the human to nurture the creative lives of Wolfsohn
and Salomon is both realized and atomized in the total biopolitical power exercised on
human life in the camp. In a sense, Salomon’s hunched figures bear witness to the secret
of biopolitics: the systematic invention of the inhuman within the human as a source of
90   The Body in Theory

exploitation. Her hunched characters emerge out of an allegorical affinity between the
living corpse created by a war and the Muselmann in the camp, where the human body
is dehumanized for the sake of extracting the biopolitical substance somewhere between
life and death.

Concluding Remarks
This paper has examined the violence peculiar to normative power in contempo-
rary biopolitics, especially since the turn of the nineteenth century, and its allegorical
expressions in the hunched figures of Géricault, Dix, and Salomon. The work of these
three artists revolves around a threshold opened up by biopower somewhere between life
and death where nonhuman, hunched figures dwell: the survivors of shipwrecks, guillo-
tined heads and limbs, returning soldiers, war cripples, and victims of the camp. These
hunched figures illuminate the distortion fundamental to the construction of modern
human subjectivity. The hunchback appears to be, or is assumed to be, the other of the
normalized upright human figure, for the hunchback’s body radically exposes its docil-
ity and vulnerability within the mechanism imposed for normalizing human life, per-
petually generating a distortion between human and nonhuman, activity and paralysis,
that permeates the world from the concentration camp to contemporary society. But the
hunchback is not, in fact, our other, and when we realize this, we might be filled with hor-
ror or dread, reminded of a deformed image of ourselves (of our own hunched sphere of
“bare life”) and fearful of losing our consistency as an upright human subject. At the same
time, however, we are irresistibly fascinated, haunted, and enlightened by this dark reali-
zation that bridges the gap between victims and witnesses, observed and observers.
By discussing the hunched figures in these art works from the perspective of the
body in art history and critical theory, particularly that of biopolitics, my aim has been
to explore the interdisciplinary methodology needed to address the violence of the norm
that is not necessarily physically traceable or even symbolically intelligible. The crea-
turely dimension of human life that is rearticulated through biopolitical discourses elu-
cidates not only the biological/technological but also the symbolic inscription of life into
the realm of power relations. Here the literary imagination and the rhetorical figurations
are at work in narrating life, increasingly resembling the fictional/allegorical qualities
that structure works of art or literature. In this symbolic dimension embedded within the
violence of the norm exercised by biopolitical power, art reveals its critical possibility to
make the invisible or symbolic modes of violence intelligible.

Notes
1. Boule’s intention was to juxtapose human and Neanderthal as two independent species and to argue
against the revolutionist view in general, which perpetually looks for the missing link in order to orchestrate
the biological hierarchy with the human sitting atop. As for Boule’s ­anti-revolutionist position, see Hammond
(15–17).
2. Later comprehensive studies of other Neanderthal raised questions regarding the way Boule’s analysis
characterizes the Neanderthal primarily by its hunched posture. The lack of curvature necessary for a fully
erect posture in the skeleton of the Neanderthal that Boule reconstructed was proven to be the product of a
pathological deformation (Straus and Cave 348–63). For the cultural representation of the Neanderthal, in
newspaper articles, that reflects the complexity of the caveman as not only a scientific but also a political and
religious site onto which various desires and morals were projected, see Sommer.
 The Hunchback as Visual Paradigm of Violence in Modern Art (Oki)  91

3. For the leftist politics implied in Géricault’s representation of colonial bodies in La Méduse, see Ryan and
Chenique.
4. As for the analysis of Salomon’s work in terms of the issue of Jewish women in relation to modernity and
suicide, see Buerkle and Pollock.
5. Each image in Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel is numbered with JHM, a reference to the Jewish His-
torical Museum in Amsterdam, which houses Salomon’s work.
6. For an analysis of the influential relationship between Wolfson and Salomon particularly focusing on
Wolfsohn’s aesthetic theory as described by Salomon in the texts of Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel, see
Timms.
7. For a detailed study of Wolfsohn’s theory of voice, see Newham, “Jung and Alfred Wolfsohn” and The
Singing Cure.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel ­Heller-Roazen,
Zone Books, 1999.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl, et al., University
of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Boule, Marcellin, and Henri V. Vallois. Fossil Men: A Textbook of Human Palaeontology, Thames and Hudson, 1957.
Bryson, Norman. “Gericault and Masculinity.” Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, edited by Norman
Bryson, et al., Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp. 228–59.
Buerkle, Darcy. “Historical Effacements: Facing Charlotte Salomon.” Reading Charlotte Salomon, edited by
Michael P. Steinberg and Monica ­Bohm-Duchen, Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 73–87.
­Carden-Coyne, Ana. Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
Chenique, Bruno. “On the Far Left of Géricault.” Théodore Géricault: The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos,
edited by Serge Guilbaut, et al., Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1997, pp. 94–114.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Penguin, 1991.
_____. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 1998.
Fox, Paul. “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix.”
Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, 2006, pp. 247–67.
Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, translated by James Strachey, et al., The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
­Psycho-Analysis, 1961, pp. 64–148.
_____. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1877–1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson, Belknap Press, 1985.
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Cannibalism Senegal: Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1819.” Extremities: Painting
Empire in ­Post-Revolutionary France, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 165–235.
Hammond, Michael. “The Expulsion of the Neanderthals from Human Ancestry: Marcellin Boule and the
Social Context of Scientific Research.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 12, 1982, pp. 1–36.
Hartley, Keith. Otto Dix 1891–1969, Tate Gallery, 1992.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure. Routledge, 1995.
Newham, Paul. “Jung and Alfred Wolfsohn.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 37, 1992, pp. 323–36.
_____. The Singing Cure: An Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy, Rider, 1993.
Nochlin, Linda. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Thames and Hudson, 1994.
Pollock, Griselda. “Theater of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon’s Modernist Fairytale.” Read-
ing Charlotte Salomon, edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica ­Bohm-Duchen, Cornell University Press,
2005, pp. 35–72.
Ryan, Maureen. “Liberal Ironies, Colonial Narratives and the Rhetoric of Art: Reconsidering Géricault’s
Radeau de La Méduse and the Traité Des Nègres.” Théodore Géricault: The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos,
edited by Serge Guilbaut, et al., Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1997, pp. 18–51.
Salomon, Charlotte. Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? Translated by Leila Vennewitz, Royal Academy of
Arts, 1998.
Sommer, Marianne. “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early ­20th-Century
French Science and Press.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 207–40.
Straus, William L., Jr., and A.J.E. Cave, “Pathology and the Posture of Neanderthal Man.” The Quarterly Review
of Biology, vol. 32, no. 4, 1957, pp. 348–63.
Timms, Edward. “Creative Synergies: Charlotte Salomon and Alfred Wolfsohn.” Reading Charlotte Salomon,
edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica ­Bohm-Duchen, Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 105–13.
Vogt, Erik. “S/Citing the Camp.” Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer,
edited by Andrew Norris, Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 74–106.
 The Ego as Body Image
Lacan’s Mirror Stage Revisited
Dan Collins

These reflections on the functions of the ego ought, above all else, to
encourage us to reexamine certain notions that are sometimes accepted
uncritically.
—Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego”

Introduction
The inaugural insight of Jacques Lacan’s career is that the basis of the ego is an iden-
tification with the body image: the body image is “assumed” by the subject as the founda-
tion of his or her ego. This formula is repeated as dogma by Lacanians, typically without
much thought as to its implications. What is the ongoing status of the image of one’s body
as ego? The mirror stage occurs when we are infants. Does this mean that we go through
life with an ego that is based on the image of ourselves as infants? The ego is tradition-
ally taken to be the seat of perception and consciousness. Does this mean that we refer
our perceptions of the world to an internal image of ourselves? The ego is also considered
the seat of emotion. Does this mean that when we feel proud or vain or humble, we adjust
our internal image accordingly? And if the ego is in some sense a body image, where does
that image reside? What is the nature of its continued existence? What form does it take?
And if we attach our sense of self to the ego, why do we not perceive our self primar-
ily as an image? The fact that such questions about the ego as image arise shows that for
most Lacanians the mirror stage remains ­under-theorized some eighty years after Lacan
first introduced it. The ego exists not only as image—in some sense—but also as func-
tion, and the relation between the conceptions of ­ego-as-image and ­ego-as-function are
obscure. Lacan’s conception of a mirror stage forces us to think of the ego as something
that “occurs” at a certain point in infant development. The functions of the ego, however,
continue throughout life.
According to Freud, unification is the dynamic function that the ego continues to
perform after the ­infant-toddler stage and throughout the rest of the subject’s life: “In the
course of things it happens again and again that individual [drives] or parts of [drives]
turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which
are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from
this unity by the process of repression” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 11). The ego, then,
92
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  93

forms a unity by actively rejecting what is incompatible with it and incorporating what is
compatible.
For Lacan too the body image encountered in the formation of the ego has a unify-
ing function. This is what Lacan calls “[t]he jubilant assumption of his specular image” by
the infant (“Mirror Stage” 76). Assuming, or taking on, this image is a jubilant moment
for the child because of what he or she overcomes in doing so: “What I have called the
‘mirror stage’ is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the sub-
ject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. In comparison with the
still very profound lack of coordination in his own motor functioning, that gestalt is an ideal
unity, a salutary imago” (“Aggressiveness” 92; emphasis mine). The child—fragmented,
chaotic, uncoordinated—suddenly sees him- or herself as an “ideal unity.” Lacan calls this
“total form” of the body “constitutive more than constituted” (“Mirror Stage” 76). In other
words, the body image is what inaugurates the ego as a sense of the unity of the subject.
In the ­Lacanian-Freudian tradition, then, the psychoanalytic notion of the ego is
both ­ego-as-image and ­ego-as-function. And some theoretical work will be required to
reconcile the two notions. In the psychoanalytic tradition outside of Lacan, theorists take
for granted some kind of unified self called the ego. If they do not ask where the ego comes
from, they are left to adopt the philosophical position of little Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
when Miss Ophelia, catechizing the child, asks if she knows who made her: “I spect I just
grow’d.” This would be a developmental view of the ego: as it is the center of perception
and consciousness, an increasing sense of unity accrues to the child’s ego as it grows up.
But this just begs the question: how does the ego become the center of perception and con-
sciousness? Several questions linger around the psychoanalytic notion of the ego, and all
of them center, in one way or another, on the image of the body. A closer examination of
the psychoanalytic grounding of the ego in the image will reveal that the complex history
of the philosophical notion of the image itself renders the status of the ego ambiguous.

History
We have begun by asking questions about the ontogeny of the ego, but to invoke a
favorite distinction of Freud’s, we should also ask about its phylogeny. When did a sense
of ego enter into human experience?
Countering the natural conception of the ego as something that “just grow’d,” Lacan
insists that the ego has a determined historical development. In Seminar II, after refer-
ring to Socrates’s introduction of subjectivity into the world, he asks, “What has hap-
pened since Socrates?” And he answers, “A lot of things, and in particular, the concept of
the ego has seen the light of day” (5). So we are given a timeframe. Sometime within the
last 2,500 years or so, the ego arose. Why, then, do we accept the ego as “natural”? Lacan
has an answer for this too:
When something comes to light, something which we are forced to consider as new, when
another structural order emerges, well then, it creates its own perspective within the past,
and we say—This can never not have been there, this has existed from the beginning. […] What
appears to be new thus always seems to extend itself indefinitely into perpetuity, prior to itself.
[…] Similarly, we can no longer do our thinking without this register of the ego which we have
acquired over the course of history [5].
The ego, then, has that ­always-already-there feeling that attaches to our concepts.
94   The Body in Theory

What may be surprising is how recent the concept of the ego in the modern sense
really is. And, in fact, we hardly need add “in the modern sense” because, as hard as it
may be for us to believe, the concept of any kind of ego seems to be quite recent. Sim-
ply looking up the word ego in the OED reveals that under the first definition, “the con-
scious thinking subject,” the earliest citation is dated 1789. The third citation under that
first definition, the earliest in which we might recognize our sense of the word ego, comes
in 1829, from The Edinburgh Review: “In every act of consciousness we distinguish a self
or ego, and something different from self, a ­non-ego; each limited and modified by the
other.” From this definition, we would certainly recognize the notion of the ­ego-as-self,
but with its language of ego and ­non-ego, this passage may still be referring to a purely
philosophical notion of ego. The third definition of ego sounds more like our modern
conception: “­Self-esteem, egotism, ­self-importance.” The date for the earliest citation
here is 1891. The fourth definition (of only four) is labeled as coming from the field of
psychology, and the first citation is dated 1894. The second citation comes from a 1910
translation of Freud. According to these citations, then, the term ego in the psychologi-
cal and psychoanalytic sense seems to arise somewhere in the 1890s, and the earliest cited
appearance of any use of the word in English at all comes only one hundred years before.
The fact that the ego has a historical development and seems to have emerged rap-
idly in a little more than a hundred years will cause us to ask why and to look for a rea-
son. For Lacanians, it is a ­well-established proposition that Descartes’s philosophy is
what introduces the modern age and the split between subject and object. In the classi-
cal period, it was taken for granted that perception presented us with objects in a more
or less unmediated way. The Cartesian method of doubt systematically empties the world
of objects, leaving the subject empty as well, grounded only in the cogito. At that point,
according to Lacan, the ego emerges as “a particular object within the experience of the
subject. Literally, the ego is an object—an object which fills a certain function which we
here call the imaginary function” (Seminar II 44). We must now ask, what is the status
and function of the ego as object?

The Ego as Projection

As Lacan suggests, we may be very surprised to find out that the ego has not always
been there—in fact, its ­non-existence may be literally unthinkable to us—and it is very
possible that our specific notion of the ego arises with Freud. It is worth pausing, then,
over the psychoanalytic notion of the ego as perceptual unity and as unity of perception.
Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, that the basis for the ego is the image of the body,
should perhaps give us pause. Lacan’s rhetoric is so powerful that we take the notion for
granted. We intuitively grasp Lacan’s notion that the ego is based on a body image. But
is the ego an image? Freud too attached the ego to the body, but his conception of the
connection between the two is somewhat more complicated than Lacan’s or, at least, the
common understanding of Lacan’s. According to Freud, “The ego is first and foremost a
bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (The
Ego and the Id 26). In The Ego and the Id as it appears in the Standard Edition, Strachey
carefully documents a footnote that appeared at this point in the first English translation
of the work but not in the German: “I.e., the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensa-
tions, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  95

as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, repre-
senting the superficies of the mental apparatus” (26). Freud is careful to say that the ego
is a “mental projection,” not an anatomical one. In the body of the text, following the pas-
sage just cited, Freud adds, “If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best
identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head
in the cortex” (26). Freud’s mention of an anatomical projection refers to the sensory
and motor cortices, actual areas of the brain that, respectively, receive sensations from
the body and control motions of the body. Because the parts of the body can literally be
mapped onto the various sections of the sensory and motor cortices (with the areas per-
taining to feet at the top of the brain and the areas pertaining to the head at the bottom),
the two cortices make up a homunculus, or “little man,” inside the brain. Anatomically,
the parts of the homunculus are called a projection of the various parts of the body onto
the nerve centers that correspond to those parts. But, Freud tells us, this is just an analogy
for the mental projection of the body’s surface. And so that mental projection, in Freud’s
conception, must exist in some other way.
The idea of a mental projection is a complicated one, but we can ask simply, when
we experience a sensation, say, a pinprick on our finger, do we experience it as projected
onto a corresponding mental projection of our finger, or do we experience it immedi-
ately? It may well be that the status of the ego as projection is entirely unconscious, but we
nevertheless must wonder why the ego is “first and foremost” that. However confused we
may be by this account, the idea of the ego as a bodily projection nevertheless seems to fit
well with Lacan’s mirror stage. In fact, Lacan’s mirror stage may be the theory that “saves”
Freud’s idea of the ego as projection. But a projection is not quite the same as an image,
and so we must ask what Lacan means by image, or, more generally, what is an image?

What Is an Image?
William James—who, let us note, is one of those authors who uses the word ego in
something like the modern sense in the 1890s—seems to be an important precursor of
psychoanalysis and Lacan in that he tried to develop a theory of the continuity of self. He
also has the most famous and perhaps the most apt description of the infant’s experience
prior to the mirror stage: “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once,
feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (Principles I 488).
But most important for our present purposes, James develops a theory of the image
and a theory of the imagination as a faculty. That faculty is not the same in all individuals.
Some people, says James, relying on Galton, are “good visualizers,” and some are “poor
visualizers” (Psychology 170–72). James writes of having asked his students for reports on
their ability to visualize. The good visualizer claims to call images to mind easily and to
“see” them, as it were. The poor visualizer cannot. If some people, at least, are able to “see”
images in their minds, this raises questions regarding the status of the image of the body
in the mirror stage. Where is that image? How does one “see” it? Where does the image
“reside,” we could say, or project itself within the mind?
James quotes a poor visualizer as having reported, “I cannot shut my eyes and get
a distinct image of anyone” (172). This simple comment has profound relevance for our
questions. Following Lacan, we are positing that the ego is based on a body image that has
been introjected. What does it mean, then, that many of us—perhaps most of us—cannot
96   The Body in Theory

call to mind sharply and distinctly the face or the figure of someone we know well? More
to the point, if we were asked to close our eyes and visualize not someone else but our-
selves, what would we see? What are we to make of the fact that we can often visualize a
stranger more readily than we could ourselves or those close to us? For example, if I were
to describe the man who just passed me on the street, I could say, for example, “Dark
hair, dark suit, high forehead, moustache.” And I could call to mind a static image of the
man very readily. But if I were asked to call to mind my mother, I might have the vague
impression of having too much information. I would ask, “My mother? Doing what?
Wearing what? In what mood?” It is possible that I have a neutral or, we could say, “stock
image” of my mother. But then the question is raised, in what relation does that stock
image stand to my actual mother, whose appearance is always changing? Further, what
are we to make of the fact that our appearance in photographs always comes as a surprise
to us? We react to photos of ourselves with faint shock and ask, “Is that what I really look
like?” If we are surprised when presented with an “objective” picture of what we look like,
what does that say about the ­self-image that we carry in our minds? Actually, it is hardly
the case that we compare the photograph to a fixed mental image of ourselves, contrast-
ing the two and enumerating a list of specific differences. More typically, when we look at
the photograph, we only have a vague, disturbing feeling of “Not that!” All of these ques-
tions should lead us to reconsider whether the mirror stage, as described by Lacan, can be
as simple as we assume it to be.
It must be said that in spite of the importance that the idea held for him, Lacan
does not really define the register of the imaginary. Perhaps what allows him to take it
for granted is that exactly at the time he was developing his theory of the mirror stage,
­Jean-Paul Sartre was publishing two important books, The Imagination and The Imagi-
nary. They were intended to be one study, with The Imagination serving as the historical
and critical introduction, but that half of the book was published separately, in 1936, with
The Imaginary, Sartre’s own study of the topic, appearing in 1940. Lacan can take the con-
cept of “the imaginary” for granted because it was “in the air” as he first started using it
within psychoanalysis.
A very long footnote to the “Translator’s Introduction” of the current English trans-
lation of Sartre’s The Imagination details just how close were the relations among Sartre,
Lacan, and their mutual colleague, Daniel Lagache (­xliv–xlvii). As he must have been
aware of the influence of Sartre’s comprehensive work on the image, Lacan hardly needed
to define the concept imaginary to his audience when his 1936 paper on the mirror stage
was revised, delivered again as a lecture, and then published in 1949. Such unacknowl-
edged borrowings by Lacan—or rather his collaborative reliance on the ideas of friends
and colleagues—are perhaps not as well known as they should be. For example, in his
1949 paper “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” Lacan’s friend Claude ­Lévi-Strauss writes that
“[t]he patient suffering from neurosis eliminates an individual myth by facing a ‘real’ psy-
choanalyst” (199). In fact, ­Lévi-Strauss makes the concept of the “individual myth” a key
concept in his essay. Lacan refers his readers to “The Effectiveness of Symbols” in “The
Mirror Stage,” which shows he was aware of it, and then in the early 1950s gives a lecture
entitled “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” which was published only in 1979. Few read-
ers of the 1979 publication would be able to identify the link to ­Lévi-Strauss as his name
does not appear in it, and so they would justifiably assume that Lacan had developed the
concept. The point of sketching out the history of such a borrowing is not “to give credit
where credit is due” but rather to emphasize the fertility of the intellectual matrix in
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  97

which Lacan’s ideas developed. In any case, we may either take as telling or safely ignore
the fact that Lacan spends an entire page of the mirror stage essay attacking existential-
ism when we realize how much Lacan relies on Sartre’s notion of the imaginary.
And from Sartre’s elaborations on the image, we may draw one term that shows that
the qualities James attributes to “poor visualizers” may, in fact, be general and inherent in
the mental image itself. In The Imaginary, Sartre refers to the poverty of the image (9, 16),
taking pains to have us distinguish among three types of consciousness that we may have
of objects—perceiving, thinking, and imagining (8). Sartre notes that when we perceive
a cube—that is, take in an actual cube with our senses and process that sensory informa-
tion in our minds—we can only see three sides at once. We must look at the other side of
the cube to see the other three and thus confirm that it is a cube. He continues thus: “it is
a characteristic of perception that the object never appears except in a series of profiles.
[…] One must learn objects. […] The object itself is the synthesis of all [its] appearances”
(8). Sartre calls the learning of objects by perception an apprenticeship. When we think a
cube—that is, call to mind the concept of a cube and the object that corresponds to it—
we “think of its six sides and its eight angles at the same time. […] [We] have no appren-
ticeship to serve” (8). In other words, if we understand the concept of cube, we can think
it all at once.
The third of Sartre’s types of consciousness that we have of objects, imagining, at
first seems to be a form of perception—a confusion that Sartre demands we dispel—inso-
far as an object is given to us, even if only internally. But there is a difference: “In percep-
tion knowledge is formed slowly; in the image, knowledge is immediate” (9). “An image,”
Sartre says, “is not learned” (9); as with thought, there is no apprenticeship to serve. But
the image is also intellectually empty: “If you turn a ­cube-image in thought to amuse
yourself, if you pretend that it presents its various faces to you, then you will not be more
advanced at the end of the operation: you will not have learned anything” (9). This is the
poverty of the image, and it seems related to, if not constitutive of, James’s poor visual-
ization. Sartre says, “I want to remember the face of my friend Pierre. I make an effort
and I produce a certain imaged consciousness of Pierre. The object is very imperfectly
attained: some details are lacking, others are suspect, the whole is rather blurred” (17).
Sartre makes general, as an attribute of mental images, those blurred features that James
claims only present themselves to poor visualizers.
The “immediate knowledge” we attain in imagining seems similar to Lacan’s “jubi-
lant assumption of the image.” But what are we to make of the poverty of the image? What
we say of Pierre, we could equally say of ourselves: “I want to remember myself. I make an
effort and I produce a certain imaged consciousness of me. The object is very imperfectly
attained: some details are lacking, others are suspect, the whole is rather blurred.” If this
is an accurate description of the image, then the image seems in no way well constituted
to serve as the basis for the essential unity that we call the ego. Using what for us is a tell-
ing term, flesh, Sartre concludes his first chapter of The Imaginary:
The final consequence of the preceding is that the flesh of the object is not the same in the
image as in perception. By “flesh” I understand the intimate texture. The classical authors gave
us the image as a less vivid perception, less clear but in all other respects like it in the flesh. We
now know that this is a mistake. The object of perception is constituted by an infinite multiplic-
ity of determinations and possible relations. On the other hand, the most determinate image
possesses in itself only a finite number of determinations, precisely those of which we are con-
scious. These determinations can remain unrelated to one another if we are not conscious that
98   The Body in Theory

they support relations between them. Hence the discontinuity at the very heart of the object
of the image, something halting, qualities that spring towards existence and stop halfway, an
essential poverty [16].

In Sartre’s account, the “classical authors” were wrong. They considered perception and
imagining as the same process but for one supposedly decisive difference: in perception
the object is present while in imagining it is absent. Classically, then, imagination was
understood as presenting us with perceptions without objects, and so naturally those
perceptions were “less vivid.” But Sartre would have us understand the real difference
between perception and imagining: objects in the real world provide our perceptions
with “infinite determinations and possible relations” while objects in imagination only
have the limited determinations and relations we provide them. This is what accounts for
their lack of vividness.
We can apply Sartre’s line of reasoning about the image to Lacan’s mirror stage: if our
­self-image is in fact an image, then it is a body without flesh, a reduction. The formation
of the ego thus depends upon the essential reduction of the real body, with its multiplic-
ity of determinations and relations, to an impoverished image.

The Ego as Function

And should we not have expected this? If the continuity of our sense of self is
sustained through all of life’s changes, would it not have to have been based upon a
­self-image reduced to a function? It would be absurd to think that the stability of our
sense of self is based on the stability of a pictured mental image while our actual appear-
ance and ­self-perception are modified and transformed by time and all of life’s vicissi-
tudes. (It is perhaps just this absurdity that Oscar Wilde tried to capture in The Picture of
Dorian Gray—by reversing the supposed relation of image and living human being.) It is
not the image of the body that is crucial in the mirror stage but the function of the image.
Lacan gives an account of this reduced function of the image in Seminar XIX, … or
Worse:
Anything whatsoever can serve to write the One of repetition. It’s not that it’s nothing, it’s that
it can be written with any old thing so long as it’s easy to repeat in figures. For the being who
finds himself in charge of making sure that, in language, it speaks, nothing lends itself more eas-
ily to figuration than what he is designed to reproduce naturally, namely, as they say, his like or
his type. Not that he knows from the start how to produce his figure, but this figure marks him,
and this he can give back to it. He can give back the mark that is precisely the unary trait. This
unary trait is the support of what I started off from under the heading of the mirror stage, that
is, imaginary identification [147].

To readers of Lacan, this passage may come as a surprise. The unary trait has always
been associated not with the imaginary but with the symbolic order as the single, count-
able trait, the basis of numeration, and the very model of the signifier. Here, however,
“the being who finds himself in charge of making sure that […] it speaks,” a circumlocu-
tion for the subject, lends him- or herself to figuration as a “type.” By possessing features
that are reproduced, the subject is like him- or herself. Being marked by this trait, his or
her type, the subject gives back to it by reproducing it. This is the unary trait as support
of the mirror stage—the image reduced to a trait. As Lacan summarizes it, “[I]maginary
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  99

identification operates through a symbolic mark” (147). But he had already said this in
“The Mirror Stage.” There he writes, “The jubilant assumption of [the infant’s] specu-
lar image […] seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in
which the I is precipitated in a primordial form” (76). The imaginary trait becomes the
repeatable and the countable, the symbolic mark. Add to this Sartre’s notion of the pov-
erty of the image, and we may note that the only content of this image is its function, that
is, to be repeatable and countable. The continuity of the self, then, is a continuity without
content. Or rather, it is a continuity filled with whatever content that we provide.
Lacan has another way of describing the reduction of the image in the mirror stage.
It is a kind of stagnation, “similar in strangeness to the faces of actors when a film is sud-
denly stopped in ­mid-frame” (“Aggressiveness” 90). For Lacan, this formal stagnation has
a function: “[it] is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge, which consti-
tutes the ego and objects as having the attributes of permanence, identity, and substance”
(90). The impoverished, reduced image, then, is a frozen image, selected from the bloom-
ing, buzzing confusion of life. It has the function of constituting the ego and the objects
of the world and endowing them with the emptiest of their attributes. The permanence of
the object is its mere continuance in time. Its identity is only the ­self-identity of the unary
trait: it is marked as marked. And the substance of objects is the presumed substrate that
underlies any of its accidental, apparent qualities. These “empty” attributes provide the
function of continuity that underlies any apparent changes in an ego or an object, and
by possessing these attributes, the ego becomes the model for all objects. More simply,
we could say that these attributes provide the background continuity against which any
changes in the ego or the object occur.
William James also wants to account for the continuity of self. He gives a description
of it in his famous thought experiment of Peter and Paul waking up:
When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each
one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of
thought which were broken by the sleeping hours. […] Peter’s present instantly finds out Peter’s
past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul’s thought in turn is as little liable
to go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may have
a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul’s last drowsy states of mind were as he sank
into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last
states. He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul’s [Psychology 25].
What accounts for this continuity of self? James contrasts remembering our own prior
mental states with only conceiving of the mental states of others. Thus for James, remem-
bering possesses some function that mere conception lacks. We would like to align this
function with the reduced function of the image in the mirror stage, and this alignment
may seem difficult insofar as Lacan has arrived at an impoverished image as the basis
for the continuity of self while James seems to arrive at a positive fullness that marks
our remembrance of self. James says that our states of being are “suffused with a warmth
and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains” (25). He calls this the
appropriation of the Me by the I:
But why should each successive mental state appropriate the same past Me? I spoke a while ago
of my own past experiences appearing to me with a “warmth and intimacy” which the expe-
riences thought of by me as having occurred to other people lack. This leads us to the answer
sought. My present Me is felt with warmth and intimacy. The heavy warm mass of my body is
there [70].
100   The Body in Theory

Even though Lacan bases his concept of ­self-continuity on a reduced, impoverished

image and James bases his on a positive feeling of “warmth and intimacy,” their positions
are not so different if we take James’s warmth and intimacy to be equivalent to Lacan’s
unary trait—a feature by which all our lived experience is marked. This equivalence is
compelling insofar as James’s notion is also based in the body as there.
To adduce one more piece of evidence that the mirror stage depends not on the body
image per se but on the function of the image, we can call upon another witness, Karl
Marx. In Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan asks us to consider a passage
in section three of the first chapter of Capital. In this chapter, Marx belabors the point
that twenty yards of linen is equivalent to one coat. In this equivalence, the coat appears
not as a coat but only—to use the language we have been developing—in a reduced func-
tion as value. It is not the coat as body that expresses value but only the coat as equiva-
lent to the linen. Marx uses exactly this strange language to describe the relationship:
“By means of the ­value-relation, therefore, the natural form of commodity B [the coat]
becomes the ­value-form of commodity A [the linen], in other words the physical body of
commodity B becomes the mirror for the value of commodity A” (144). To clarify and to
expand, Marx inserts a footnote at this point commenting that man “is in the same sit-
uation as a commodity,” but he wryly notes that man does not enter into the world “in
possession of a mirror” (144). Instead of recognizing himself in a mirror, then, “a man
first sees and recognizes himself in another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man
through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognizes his likeness. With this,
however, Paul also becomes […] in his physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of
the species man for Peter” (144). It is not initially as ­Paul-himself, ­Paul-with-attributes,
­Paul-with-qualities that Paul enters into relationship with Peter, but only as Paul reduced
to a representative of the species “man.” Marx is perhaps clearer than Lacan that it is not
the image itself that forms the equivalence but rather the function of a reduced, impover-
ished image. Lacan is delighted by Marx’s footnote, calling Marx “a precursor of the mir-
ror stage” (Formations 73).

The Imago
As a summary of the position we have reached, we can quote Lacan and at the same
time introduce a term we have not yet used: “The function of the mirror stage thus turns
out, in my view, to be a particular case of the function of imagos, which is to establish a
relationship between an organism and its reality” (“Mirror Stage” 78). The question we
have been asking—what is the function of the body image in the mirror stage?—turns
out to be partially a question of terminology. We have clarified considerably the role of
that image, but to be more precise, we have also been talking about the function of an
imago.
In psychoanalysis, imago is one of those terms more often used than defined, and
so we should turn to one of the available definitions. Laplanche and Pontalis, in The Lan-
guage of ­Psycho-Analysis, comment that “[t]he imago is often defined as an ‘unconscious
representation.’ It should be looked upon, however, as an acquired imaginary set rather
than as an image: as a stereotype through which, as it were, the subject views the other
person” (211). This definition requires some unpacking. An imago is an “unconscious
representation,” and thus we might assume that it is an image. Because we talk readily in
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  101

psychoanalysis of, for example, father imagos and mother imagos, we might imagine that
we “naturally” have mental images of “father” and “mother” that, when we are infants,
would orient us in our family relationships. But we should note two objections to this
assumption right away. First, “father” and “mother” are not our own individual fathers
and mothers, or even their images, but their roles or functions. And second, the imagos
that we possess are not natural but, as Laplanche and Pontalis say, acquired. An imago,
then, is not an image at all but an acquired template for identifications and relationships.
In ­real-life relationships, when someone reminds us of our father, for example, it is not
because of a superficial resemblance, nor because he is the image of our father; rather it is
because we impose our father imago upon him.
The mirror stage, however, is a special case in that the template for the other involved
in the relationship is the image of one’s own body. There is no doubt that there exists in
the mirror what Lacan would call a “real image” of the infant. That image, once assumed,
becomes both more and less than an image, just as Marx’s coat became more and less
than a coat. Marx’s coat, in its relation of equivalence to linen, is no longer being consid-
ered as a coat but only as a value. Likewise, the body image is no longer a specific image,
pictured in the mind’s eye, but the “imago of one’s own body” (“Mirror Stage” 77), which
now serves the function of unifying perception and consciousness of self.
The difficulties we may have encountered in understanding Lacan’s conception of
the mirror stage arise from the fact that he relies on Sartre’s theory of the imaginary with-
out elaborating upon it and from the fact that by his repeated shorthand references to the
“specular image” over the years, he obscures the relation of the image in the mirror to the
imago that it establishes. The unity of the ego, understood properly, is a function of the
imago of one’s own body, which endows the ego with “attributes of permanence, identity,
and substance,” or, as James would say, endows the Me with a sense of “warmth and inti-
macy and immediacy” (Psychology 25).

Another Conception of the Ego

Finally, it must be admitted that there is another conception of the ego that seems
totally at odds with the one that we have examined. After the development of his second
topography in The Ego and the Id, Freud, in passage after passage, describes the ego as a
“cortical layer”:
[I]n trying to make the relation between the ego and the id clear, I must ask you to picture the
ego as a kind of façade of the id, as a frontage, like an external, cortical, layer of it. […] Thus we
suppose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (of the id) which has been modified by
the influence of the external world (of reality) [The Question of Lay Analysis 195].
To this idea is added the notion that the ego as external layer is also a shield:
We need scarcely look for a justification of the view that the ego is that portion of the id which
was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world, which is adapted for the
reception of stimuli and as a protective shield against stimuli, comparable to the cortical
layer by which a small piece of living substance is surrounded [New Introductory Lectures on
­Psycho-Analysis 75].
And that shield acts both as a barrier and as a mediator between the id and the external
world:
102   The Body in Theory

Under the influence of the real external world around us, one portion of the id has undergone
a special development. From what was originally a cortical layer, equipped with the organs for
receiving stimuli and with arrangements for acting as a protective shield against stimuli, a spe-
cial organization has arisen which henceforward acts as an intermediary between the id and
the external world. To this region of our mind we have given the name of ego [An Outline of
­Psycho-Analysis 145].
In this conception, the ego has developed entirely out of the id. As the portion of the id
in closest proximity with the external world, it has been modified, as if by the constant
abrasion of reality. This toughening of the surface of the id, then, is similar to the forma-
tion of a callus. This toughened surface of the id, that is, the ego, serves as a “protective
shield” against stimuli while also being somewhat porous and thus receptive to them.
How are we to reconcile this notion of the ego as a shield that protects with that of the ego
as imago that creates and maintains a unity?
In fact, the Freudian and the Lacanian notions can be reconciled because Lacan too
describes the ego as shield: “the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes
precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation […] and to the finally donned armor of
an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] entire mental development with its
rigid structure” (“Mirror Stage” 78). Thus, the alienating image, that is, the subject’s iden-
tity, is a kind of protective “armor.” The effect of this armor is to create a division between
the subject’s Innenwelt and Umwelt, that is, between the subject’s internal and external
worlds (78). Lacan uses a similar image in “Some Reflections on the Ego”: “It is the gap
separating man from nature that determines his lack of relationship with nature, and
begets his narcissistic shield with its nacreous covering on which is painted the world
from which he is for ever cut off ” (16). The narcissistic image, then—which we have
found to be reducible to the unifying function of the ego—protects the subject where he
or she is both strongest and weakest, a seemingly contradictory idea that can be summed
up in the phrase “most defensive” in two senses: strongest because best defended, weakest
because most in need of defense. The break between the Innenwelt and Umwelt is occa-
sioned by the fact that this very shield separates those stimuli coming from within (the
drives) and those coming from without (the external world). The two different realities
serve the pleasure principle and the reality principle respectively.
This dual orientation can be summed up in one of the most elaborate metaphors
of Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” essay: “the I formation is symbolized in dreams by a fortified
camp, or even a stadium—distributing, between the arena within its walls and its outer
border of ­gravel-pits and marshes, two opposed fields of battle where the subject bogs
down in his quest for the proud, remote inner castles whose form […] strikingly symbol-
izes the id” (78). This passage can be read as a more poetic version of Freud’s own account
of the dual orientation of the ego:
For the ego has to try from the very outset to fulfil its task of mediating between its id and the
external world in the service of the pleasure principle, and to protect the id from the dangers of
the external world. If, in the course of these efforts, the ego learns to adopt a defensive attitude
towards its own id as well and to treat the latter’s [drive-]demands as external dangers, this hap-
pens, at any rate in part, because it understands that a satisfaction of [the drive] would lead to
conflicts with the external world [“Analysis Terminable and Interminable” 235].
In both Freud’s account and Lacan’s, the ego fights a battle on two fronts—against the
external world and against the internal drives—to maintain its integrity, that is, its unity.
And so the idea of ego as shield and ego as unity are not contradictory at all. In fact,
 The Ego as Body Image (Collins)  103

Freud hinted at this in one of the first passages we considered. The ego shields itself from,
or fends off, any drive that cannot be incorporated into “the inclusive unity of the ego”
(Beyond the Pleasure Principle 11).
As we have seen, the concept of the ego gives rise to multiple explanatory meta-
phors and descriptive accounts, and the diversity of explanations of the ego makes it dif-
ficult to maintain its theoretical integrity. To summarize, the ego serves two functions.
First, even though it is founded upon the image of the body, the ego is not that image but
rather serves the function of lending attributes of permanence, identity, and substance to
those images of the body that attach to it. And second, that very unifying function—by
rejecting what is incompatible with ego—serves as a shield protecting the ego from the
onslaughts of both unwanted drive impulses and unwelcome external stimuli.

Conclusion
Our examination of the ego and its basis in the body image leaves the ego on a much
more unstable theoretical foundation than we might have hoped. The complexities of the
very concept of a mental image—well documented by James and Sartre—have under-
mined our confidence in the Lacanian doctrine that the child simply “assumes” its mirror
image as the basis of its ego. We might content ourselves with a simple caution against lit-
eralism and say that just because the ego is based on an identification with an image, this
does not mean that the ego is an image, but such a stance leaves too much unexplained.
Lacanian analyst Russell Grigg has argued that “there are two quite separate, inde-
pendent lines of thought running through Lacan’s considerations about the ego,” and
he comments frankly, “I don’t see that he ever really demonstrated how the two were
especially connected.” The two strands of thought he identifies in Lacan align with what
he calls the ­ego-subject and the ­ego-object, corresponding to what I have called here
­ego-as-function and ­ego-as-image. The first is concerned with the ego as seat of agency
and knowledge, the second with imaginary ego formation. It is largely the second that has
been taken up in this paper.
The ego as agency and the ego as ­self-image still remain to be more conceptually inte-
grated. The implicit argument of this paper has been that one way to achieve that integra-
tion is to range beyond the bounds of psychoanalytic theory and to explore the history of
how other disciplines have conceptualized the ego and the image. For example, William
James considers the self “partly object and partly subject” and speaks of an “empirical ego”
and a “pure ego” (Psychology 43). Given the history of such conceptualizations, Lacan’s mir-
ror stage now appears as a moment in a long attempt to integrate two accounts of the ego.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1964, pp. 209–54.
_____. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 18, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1955, 7–64.
_____. “The Ego and the Id.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.
19, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 13–66.
_____. “New Introductory Lectures on ­Psycho-Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 13–66.
104   The Body in Theory

_____. “An Outline of ­Psycho-Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 23, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1964, pp. 139–208.
_____. “The Question of Lay Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 22, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 179–270.
Grigg, Russell. “The Place of the Imaginary Ego in the Treatment.” Psychoanalysis Lacan, 1, 2015, www.
psychoanalysislacan.com/­wp-content/uploads/2015/11/­Imaginary-ego-Lacan-journal.pdf.
James, William. Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. Dover Books, 1950.
_____. Psychology: The Briefer Course. Dover Books, 2001.
Lacan, Jacques. “Agressiveness in Psychoanalysis.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by
Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 82–101.
_____. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: The
First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 75–81.
_____. “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, translated by Martha Noel Evans, vol. 48,
1979, pp. 405–25.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.
Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, Norton, 1988.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious. Translated by Russell Grigg, Pol-
ity Press, 2017.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX:. .. or Worse. Translated by A. R. Price, Polity Press,
2018.
_____. “Some Reflections on the Ego.” International Journal of ­Psycho-Analysis, vol. 34, 1953, pp. 11–17.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of ­Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald ­Nicholson-Smith,
Norton, 1973.
­Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf, Basic
Books, 1963.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin, 1990.
Sartre, ­Jean-Paul. The Imaginary. Translated by Jonathan Webber, Routledge, 2004.
_____. The Imagination. Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf, Routledge, 2012.
 Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery
in the Fiction of Patrick O’Brian
John Halbrooks

Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the

basis for ­self-recognition or for understanding other men.
—Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

“Pray what did he prescribe?” asked Lord Melville, who was intensely
interested in his own body, and so in bodies in general.
—Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain

Early in Patrick O’Brian’s 1972 historical novel Post Captain (the second in a series
of twenty completed between 1969 and 1999), the reader finds a description of a diary:
“It was scattered with anatomical drawings, descriptions of plants, birds, moving crea-
tures, and if it had been deciphered the scientific part would have been found to be in
Latin; but the personal observations were all in Catalan, the language he had spoken
most of his youth” (56). The diary belongs to Stephen Maturin—physician, natural phi-
losopher, intelligence agent for Nelson’s navy—whose primary interest is in bodies (his
patients,’ those of animals, cadavers, his own), bodies in all their varieties, in their ten-
dencies (sexual, digestive, purgative), and in their connection to the mind. Throughout
this novel, as well as in the novels that follow in sequence, Maturin deliberately engages
in what Foucault in the History of Sexuality would describe as the conversion of the body
into discourse: description, categorization, diagnosis. For Foucault, the modern subject
is compelled into a kind of pathologizing of the self, a state of affairs which is reflected in
Maturin’s diary. However, the division of his diary into its Latin and Catalan sections also
marks a curious division of the self into analytical observer and confessing subject: on the
one hand, observation, “objectivity,” natural philosophy; on the other, introspection, aes-
thetics, ­self-reforming.
The rhetorical performance of any diary is strange. Who is the audience? The
present self? The future self? An unknown reader? For whom is the self performing?
Although Maturin’s diary is part of a historical novel, which, as we will see, poses par-
ticular theoretical problems that are different from those concerning actual historical
diaries, these rhetorical questions remain. An actual ­eighteenth-century diarist and nov-
elist, the young Frances Burney, after considering various possibilities, determined that
she would address her diary to “Nobody” (941). “Nobody,” of course, signals the lack of
a body, perhaps the erasure of the body that is writing on the page. But it also may signal

105
106   The Body in Theory

the Cartesian division of the self into the body and the thinking mind that observes the
body, a potentially deceptive division because it encourages a disregard for the vari-
ous physical needs, desires, and sensations that are so important in the formation of the
mind. It is a gesture towards the body, which is physically absent in the text. In Maturin’s
case, throughout the cycle of O’Brian’s novels, this division occurs in the actual text, as
the body is converted into discourse (Catalan) for the thinking mind (Latin) to observe,
to diagnose, to prescribe the body. Although the division is illusory, a fiction, it forms
the basis for Maturin’s ­self-construction—a division of the self between, for example, an
observing scientist and a subject whose capricious actions, desires, and anxieties must be
taxonomized, pathologized, diagnosed, cured. And, of course, Maturin himself is a fic-
tional creation, and so the fictional division itself is layered within the fictional structure
of the narrative; the diary is, therefore, a sort of fictional hypothesis about how the think-
ing mind constructs the self.
The diary as a form is also a sort of confession—a confession of the self to the self,
a structure which also insists upon a division of the self, concurrent with but different
from the Cartesian division: speaking self and listening self. As Foucault notes, the act of
confession “detached itself from the sacrament of penance” in the early modern period
(History 68). No longer was the listener a priest but rather a physician or a scientist or an
authority of some other, secular kind. The removal of a religious doctrine from the con-
fessional dynamic granted a particular kind of authority to this listener because he or
she was no longer simply enacting doctrinal rules of penance but rather “was the master
of truth. His was a hermeneutic function” (67). Such a dynamic could incite a desire to
deceive the listener: no longer could the confessing subject simply confess, do penance,
and receive absolution. Instead, the subject would enter into a kind of continual anal-
ysis with one’s confessions recorded and kept for further study, a process which could
motivate one to hide or to justify one’s desires from the analyst. This dynamic, therefore,
potentially creates a context for a pattern of ­self-deception if the self is one’s own analyst.
This was also the time at which the diary emerged as a form. In Pepys, in Burney, and in
other early diarists, we observe a strange negotiation between confessing self and analyt-
ical or prescriptive listener. Sometimes this negotiation takes the form of a real desire for
­self-improvement, as when Pepys resolves to curtail his drinking; at other times a con-
sciousness of this ­self-division emerges, as when Burney decides to address the diary to
“Nobody.” In Maturin’s case (which, of course, unlike Pepys’s or Burney’s, is fictional), his
multiple roles complicate this negotiation. As a physician or as an intelligence agent, he
must hear the confessions of others—sometimes compelled, sometimes freely offered—
and he must interpret, analyze, judge them. When he confesses to himself, however, he
exhibits contradictory desires: to be objective and exacting but also (unconsciously?) to
deceive the analyst and to justify his own behaviors and desires.
But the division is even more complex and multiplicitous than this. It is as if O’Brian
is imagining as complicated a subject as possible and considering how such a subject
might maintain coherence. Maturin’s diary throughout the series of novels will serve as a
metonym for an interiority that must negotiate a remarkable complexity of various forms
of power, authority, and subjection. As a physician, he must be an authority on human
bodies (including, presumably, his own), and he must exercise a certain kind of power
in relation to his patients (including himself?). As a natural philosopher, he must be an
authority on all sorts of bodies: human, animal, vegetable, mineral. As a naval physi-
cian, he must serve at the pleasure of his captain and thus must be, for example, subject
 Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery (Halbrooks)  107

to orders. As the particular friend of this same captain, he negotiates the intrinsic power
relationship implicit in an intimate friendship. As an intelligence agent, he is at once sub-
ject to various political mandates and must operate within a surreptitious network of
power—with others often caught up in the network who lack awareness of his role in
their subjugation. As a devout, practicing Catholic in a Protestant service, he simulta-
neously is subject to doctrinal powers (and other confessors) and is placed at a social
disadvantage. As an Irishman, he is both subject to a colonial power and a willing, if
ambivalent, participant in the colonial enterprise.
Above all, however, as a private, modern, thinking subject, he must negotiate all of
these complexities in relation to his own physical and psychological desires, needs, and
limitations. He struggles, for example, with his ongoing sexual obsession with Diana Vil-
liers, as he constantly analyzes his desires and their physical and psychological effects:
February 15 … then when she suddenly kissed me, the strength left my knees, quite ludicrously,
and I could scarcely follow her into the ­ball-room with any countenance. I had sworn to allow
no such thing again, no strong dolorous emotion ever again: my whole conduct of late proves
how I lie. I have done everything in my power to get my heart under the harrow [Post Captain
56].

To whom is he accusing himself of lying here? Presumably, it is some other version

or aspect of himself. His particular role as an authority figure places him in a strange
relationship to his own body—as he is both subject to these desires, needs, and limita-
tions and the authority who seeks to control and limit them. To an extent, of course,
this negotiation is typical of modern subjectivity: the modern subject is called upon to
observe, analyze, and discipline the self. (This idea is the essential claim of Foucault’s Dis-
cipline and Punish.) However, Maturin has access to specific technologies and lexicons
that allow him to pathologize, diagnose, and even treat his own physical and psycholog-
ical tendencies. We are, of course, familiar with the phenomenon of the ­self-medicating
physician. In Maturin’s case, however, the reader is often struck by the complexity of
­self-justification and ­self-questioning, which often draw upon his various mandates and
obligations derived from his various authoritative roles. Sometimes this ­self-analysis
leads him, through discourse, into an ambivalent and possibly dishonest complexity of
­self-denial and ­self-gratification, as he uses (for example, in an episode that I shall discuss
at length below) a stated effort to curtail sexual desire in order to justify his indulgence in
laudanum because it serves as an ­anti-aphrodisiac, despite his medical understanding of
his own tendency to addiction. In cases like this one, the “real” Stephen Maturin becomes
impossible to discern as the Cartesian mind/body distinction is rendered illusory: bodily
desires create the mind and dictate to it. The literary result is a complex irony through
which the reader must untangle a web of intention and ­self-deception spun by competing
authoritative and analytical discourses.
This essay will posit that O’Brian’s erudite historical novels form a kind of alterna-
tive, parallel “genealogy” of the formation of the modern subject to those found in Fou-
cault’s Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Although, as far as I know,
O’Brian was not familiar with Foucault’s work, his novels often read as a kind of thought
experiment that subjects Foucault’s genealogies to imaginative manifestations of subject
formation and of their implications for how historical forms of discipline, taxonomy, and
observation affected the ways in which people negotiated their fraught relationships with
their bodies and their conceptions of self. In particular, Stephen Maturin, in his diary,
108   The Body in Theory

in the representation of his thought through ­free-indirect discourse, in interior mono-

logues, and as an “expert” in various fields, fills the roles of observer and observed, sub-
ject and object of study. I shall focus on two examples of Maturin’s struggles with body
and self: first, an extended example from Desolation Island will demonstrate the ways in
which Maturin negotiates his body’s cravings for opium along with the disapprobation
of his moral and medical selves; then I will consider the most extraordinary example of
Maturin filling roles of both physician and patient, an episode in which he performs sur-
gery on himself in HMS Surprise.
These claims require some discussion of the form of the historical novel as a legit-
imate subject for such an analysis. After all, O’Brian’s works are not historical texts, nor
are they even literary products of the historical period that they explore. It would not be
acceptable to treat these novels naively as objective, accurate reflections of Nelson’s navy
during the Napoleonic period. Rather, they form a mimetic effort at an historical remove
with all of the inevitable anachronisms and mischaracterizations inherent in such a proj-
ect despite the very great extent of O’Brian’s erudition and apparent good faith. (O’Brian
claims, for example, that the naval engagements in the early novels are derived from log
books and other ­first-hand accounts from the period: “and so when I describe a fight I
have ­log-books, official letters, contemporary accounts or the participants’ own memoirs
to vouch for every exchange” [Master and Commander, “Author’s Note” 5]). Despite the
limitations of historical novels as historical documents, the theoretical frame famously
established by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel can provide a useful foundation for
analysis of O’Brian’s fiction. For Lukács, the historical novel has the analytical function
of demonstrating how historical forces and historical change can affect the lives of more
or less average people or (in the case of novels that focus on famous historical figures)
how the “novel simply reflects how necessity and change interlock in historical life. Thus,
chance is reduced here only in the sense in which history itself reduces it. It is reduced by
our being shown in human terms how the concrete historical forces of a particular period
have become concentrated in the life of this particular individual” (315). In the case of
O’Brian, the novels form a sort of historical argument that merges the functions that
Lukács describes: Maturin and his ­co-protagonist, Captain Jack Aubrey, both have the
opportunity to make history and are made by it. While the making of history offers the
typical pleasures of naval genre fiction (the winning of important battles, the successful
completion of intelligence operations, and even, ultimately, the defeat of Napoleon him-
self), O’Brian’s more significant historical argument can be found in the novels’ quieter
moments—specifically, in the moments in which he imagines the interiority of the sub-
ject, an interiority shaped by historical forms of discourse and discipline.
The British Navy during the Napoleonic period was adept at engaging in the forms
of discipline that Foucault describes as producing “docile bodies.” While there was a con-
siderable amount of punishment inflicted on the body—notably flogging—O’Brian’s
Captain Aubrey repeatedly expresses his preference for a more “humane,” disciplined
approach to power. His gun crews regularly practice working their pieces until they reach
a certain level of proficiency; his men are able to “hand, reef, and steer” through constant,
supervised repetition; and the sailors possess the discipline required to sail a ­tall-masted,
­square-rigged ship. A Foucauldian analysis of power in this context, based mostly on
the ideas expressed in Discipline and Punish, would yield a predictable series of claims:
Aubrey’s ship stands for a transitional phase between older forms of power that emanate
from a hierarchy and inflict punishment directly upon the body—punishment that serves
 Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery (Halbrooks)  109

as a public example and warning—and newer forms of power that instill discipline, are
based in surveillance and record keeping, and purport to be more modern, efficient, and
humane than the whip and the scaffold. Such an analysis would not be wrong and could
certainly yield useful insights, but perhaps less obvious is the possibility of a more com-
plicated Foucauldian study of the forms of discipline and discourse adjacent to these
more traditionally military forms—specifically, forms dedicated to more private contexts
of analysis: medicine, intelligence gathering, natural philosophy. As the ship’s physician,
Maturin is a warrant officer in the navy, but he is not really of it, since he does not par-
ticipate in the sailing or the fighting of the ship. And while this would be somewhat true
of any naval surgeon, it is especially the case with Maturin, whose other professional
and vocational identities I have already enumerated (i.e., intelligence agent, scientist).
And although Maturin’s ways sometimes create tension with naval routines, the faith that
Aubrey and his men have in his medical authority and mastery is so complete as to almost
amount to magical thinking. At one point, when celebrating Maturin’s medical abilities,
Aubrey tells him: “It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a
piece of the true cross.” Furthermore, his men “had known that if he chose Dr. Maturin
could save anyone, so long as the tide had not turned; and Jack was so thoroughly a sea-
man that he shared nearly all their beliefs, though in a somewhat more polished form”
(HMS Surprise 119–120). Medical authority, it seems, has replaced the Church not only in
the confessional but also in matters of faith and grace.
Maturin, however, is under no illusions regarding his powers as a physician: “Med-
icine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set
your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all” (119). The mastery over the human body
that Aubrey assumes that Maturin possesses is illusory, and Maturin’s awareness of this
illusion informs much of his diary. However, it also, in other contexts, fosters this illu-
sion of mastery or, at least, of total objectivity, as in this conversation with Louisa Wogan,
a female patient being transported on his ship to Australia for alleged crimes related to
espionage:
“Upon my word, you are beyond the pale of humanity. You tell me I am not in looks, and you
name what cannot be named.”
“I am a physician, child: at times my office sets me as far beyond the human pale as the ton-
sure sets a priest.”
“So medical men do not look upon their patients as beings of the same race as themselves?”
“Let me put it thus: when I am called in to a lady, I see a female body, more or less deranged
in its functions. You will say that it is inhabited by a mind that may partake of its distress, and
I grant you your position entirely. Yet for me the patient is not a woman, in the common sense.
Gallantry would be out of place, and what is worse, unscientific” [Desolation Island 243].
Foucault would suggest that this association of the medical “office” with a priestly func-
tion indicates an historical process of the transference of the role of the confessor from
the church to the scientific disciplines, and with this process came a change in the forma-
tion of the subject:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the
statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess
without the presence [… ] of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who
requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish,
forgive, console, and reconcile; […] a ritual in which the expression alone […] produces intrin-
sic modifications in the person who articulates it […] [History 61–62].
110   The Body in Theory

With the Enlightenment, “this rite [of confession] gradually detached itself from the sac-
rament of penance, and […] emigrated toward pedagogy, relationships between adults
and children, family relations, medicine, and psychiatry” (68). Maturin, a Catholic him-
self, recognizes this specific historical shift for his mostly Protestant patients. In HMS
Surprise, an officer tells him in private of his desperately unhappy marriage and his feel-
ings of responsibility for it: “Protestants often confessed to medical men and Stephen had
heard this history before, always with the ritual plea for advice […]” (129). Perhaps this
tendency that Maturin regards as Protestant is partly the result of a shift towards analyti-
cal subjectivity that endows the physician with a hermeneutic function: the medical man
supposedly understands the most private aspects of the self because it is his job to ana-
lyze them.
In Maturin, therefore, O’Brian imagines a man who is both cognizant of his per-
ceived authority and aware of the artificiality of this authority. It is this ambivalence that
comes through most powerfully in the diary, as he becomes his own confessing “part-
ner.” In the diary, moments of honest attempts at ­self-analysis alternate with moments
of sophisticated ­self-deception. In the entry quoted above, he acknowledges that he lies
to himself, and he continues to do so, especially concerning his growing physical depen-
dence on laudanum: “I am not strongly tempted to drink up the laudanum whose drops
I count so superstitiously each night. Four hundred drops at present, my bottled tran-
quility. Yet I do so” (Post Captain 86). While the “addictive personality” had yet to be
described by science at the time when the novel is set, Maturin would certainly fit the
bill: later in the series, in The Wine Dark Sea, after he has broken his opium addiction, he
replaces it with the Peruvian coca leaf, once again justifying his usage for medical pur-
poses. The conquering of addiction is framed in terms of the mind against the body, the
physician against the recalcitrant patient, or, in the most telling moments, the confes-
sor against the sinner—with various forms of the self playing all of these roles. This com-
plexity breaks down the coherence of the Cartesian mind/body distinctions, as physical
desires dictate various justifications to the mind for their fulfillment. Sometimes, rather
than acting independently, the mind does what the body tells it to do.
In the preface to the 1822 edition of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas
De Quincey describes a similarly divided self, in which the mind struggles against the
dictates of the body in its efforts to assume a disciplinary authority over it:
If ­opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to
an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is not less true that I have struggled against this
fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never
yet heard attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost to its final lengths, the accursed
chain which fettered me [211, emphasis mine].
Note the qualifying “almost” along with the language of confession. While O’Brian made
use of contemporary accounts in his descriptions of naval engagements, he never to my
knowledge indicates which personal accounts he consulted as he constructed his fic-
tional subjects, but De Quincey seems to resonate here. The consciousness of the divided
self, which is implicit in Pepys (seventeenth century) and Burney (late eighteenth cen-
tury) is fully formed in De Quincey in 1822 as he recalls his first use of opium early in
the century. This initial use of the drug corresponds with Maturin’s chronologically. De
Quincey, in his more “scientific” (or journalistic) ­self-consciously objective attempt at
­self-analysis, like his fictional counterpart, strives to convert the body and his struggles
with it into discourse. These struggles also suggest a struggle for coherence against the
 Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery (Halbrooks)  111

continual changeability of the self or, perhaps, a kind of continuous improvisation: “For
if De Quincey indeed views time as infinitely divisible, then he can assume neither a
continuous personality nor consistent behavior for either himself or the audience whose
behavior is modeled after his own” (Young 64). In Maturin’s case, the form of the diary
represents time as divisible and offers snapshots of the self—perhaps justifying, explain-
ing, or confessing to some future self. Particular entries marking particular moments in
time might be refuted or contradicted by subsequent entries as various impulses, desires,
and disciplines assert themselves, creating an internal dialogue and complicating any
notion of a coherent self.
One extended example of this sort of dialogue with the self occurs in the course
of the narrative of Desolation Island, the fifth volume in the sequence, first published
in 1978. Throughout the novel, Maturin’s growing dependence on laudanum becomes
apparent, although it is never the book’s primary focus. It remains hidden from the other
characters and partially hidden from the reader, as he attempts to deceive himself regard-
ing the extent of the problem. Early in the novel, he seems momentarily to resolve to
break the habit as he flings his laudanum bottle out of the window of a ­post-chaise: “The
bottle struck a stone rather than the grassy bank, exploding like a small grenade and cov-
ering the road with tincture of laudanum” (40). The breaking bottle disrupts both the
serenity he seeks in breaking the habit and his desire to conceal that habit, both from oth-
ers and from himself: “the ­post-boy turned at the sound, but meeting his passenger’s pale
eyes, fixed upon him in a cold inimical stare, he feigned interest in a passing tilbury […]”
(40). At the next stop, however, he visits an apothecary’s shop, ostensibly to buy spir-
its of wine in order to preserve a specimen that he is carrying. Before he leaves the shop,
he speaks casually to the apothecary: “While I am here, I might as well take a pint of the
alcoholic tincture of laudanum” (41).
While the reader does not forget this episode, it fades from view as other narrative
priorities crowd into the foreground. Nearly a hundred pages later, however, is the first
extended entry in Maturin’s diary in the novel. This should be a moment for “confession,”
for ­self-analysis, and, in a sense, it seems to be just that. The entry goes on for six printed
pages, most of which takes the form of an extended, detached psychological analysis of
several people sailing with him on his current voyage, including a beautiful woman, Lou-
isa Wogan, who is a suspected American intelligence agent being transported to Aus-
tralia for her alleged crimes. As he contemplates his interactions with her, he writes the
following:
Furthermore, deep stirrings within my own person are by no means absent: a consequence of
my abstention, opium in all its forms being an antiaphrodisiac, counteracting venereal desire.
Does not duty require that I should resume? In moderation of course and by no means as an
indulgence, but rather as part of a process of inquiry, in which a clean, chaste mind is essential.
A very devilish suggestion [132].
This passage is remarkable in a number of ways, not least of which is the concatenation,
within the span of four sentences, of various modes of discourse, each of which plays
an important role in Maturin’s ­self-construction and in his understanding of his body.
Using medical discourse, he considers the effects of the drug and withdrawal from it.
He invokes the discourse of personal honor and duty in order to consider the possibil-
ity of returning to the drug, along with the language of scientific method and the “objec-
tivity” necessary for impartial observation. Thus far, he seems to consider the body and
its cravings as separate from the mental operations required for this ­pseudo-objective
112   The Body in Theory

analysis of it. However, the discourse shifts in the final sentence with the word “devil-
ish.” While he presumably does not mean the word literally, its use shatters the sense of
objectivity as well as the ­self-deception made possible by the aura of scientific author-
ity implicit in his medical discourse. He seems to acknowledge to himself the deception,
to “confess” to himself that the previous language represented a failed attempt to assume
the role of his own analyst. And although its use is not literal, the choice of adjectives
is surely significant, as “devilish” invokes older modes of confession and temptation, in
which the cravings of the body are interpreted as sinful tendencies and which are encour-
aged by devilish forces. The word suggests that the body, with its unfortunate desires, has
insinuated itself into the mind and thus has complicated the coherent, Cartesian division
between the two.
This is not the end of the story, even though the laudanum thread again is submerged
beneath other narrative priorities. This submersion is itself significant, for Maturin him-
self stops referring to it both in his diary and in internal monologues. The reality of his
­self-deception has come too near the surface, and the narrative does not represent the
issue as reappearing in his private consciousness until late in the novel. Significantly, the
issue does emerge externally to his consciousness in an interchange with another passen-
ger on the ship named Michael Herapath, a discovered stowaway, Louisa Wogan’s lover,
and an expert in all things Chinese, including opium. Herapath relates to Maturin his
entire history, and his listener does not interrupt the story until the teller comes to his
opium use, to which he turned to allay “both sexual and physical hunger” (189). Maturin
asks, “Did not you find any inconvenience? We read of loss of appetite, emaciation, want
of the vital spark, habituation, and even a most degrading slavery” (189). Maturin’s sug-
gestion that he knows this only from his reading of the medical literature is, of course,
disingenuous, and it is yet another example of his invoking of “disinterested” medical
authority for very personal reasons indeed. Herapath responds that although the drug
did not affect him as much as this, it did eventually become a habit, which he broke, and
that now he uses it only occasionally. Maturin again interrupts:
“Do you tell me, Mr. Herapath, that having broke the habit you were able to return to a moder-
ate, and pleasurable, use of the drug?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And in the intervals, did not you crave? The craving did not return?”
“No, sir, after the clean break it did not. The opium was my old accustomed friend again. I
could address myself to it when I chose, or refrain. Had I a supply at present, I should use it as a
Sunday indulgence and to endure the tedium of Mr. Fisher’s sermons […]” [191].
While it is apparent that Maturin’s questions are not disinterested, it is a sign of O’Brian’s
restraint as a novelist that we do not have an account of Maturin’s internal response to
this exchange in internal monologue, or in ­free-indirect discourse, or in the diary itself.
The nature of his questions is enough to indicate to the reader what he is thinking. But
this restraint also suggests that Maturin does not allow himself a conscious, articulated
response because the temptation to ­self-deception would be too apparent should he do
so. He cannot assume the role of medical authority with himself as his observed subject
or patient because the artificiality of such a divided identity would be consciously unsus-
tainable in this case.
Later, however, after Herapath seems to have quarreled with Louisa Wogan, this
entry appears in his diary: “‘Poor Michael Herapath,’ wrote Stephen in his book, ‘he suf-
fers much. I know the harrow’s mark too well ever to mistake it, the harrow directed by
 Desire, Discourse, and Autosurgery (Halbrooks)  113

a determined woman. Perhaps I shall give him a little of my laudanum, to tide him over
till the Cape’” (218). That he has returned to laudanum here seems a fait accompli, and yet
there is no reference to it until this moment, which suggests that he has not allowed him-
self to debate the matter with the authoritative “confessor,” the Maturin who poses as a
medical and ­quasi-moral voice in relation to his “confessing” self of physical and emo-
tional cravings. He has worked to conceal his renewed habit from his physician, although
his physician is himself.
Later still, after his ship has become stranded on the Desolation Island of the title, a
­sea-elephant is apparently defending his harem of females:
[The ­sea-elephant] still would not suffer [him] to come close to [the females], although they
had been acquainted for such a while: it would still rear up and writhe its person, gibbering,
gnashing its teeth, blowing out its inflatable nose, and even roaring aloud. “Did he but know,”
reflected Stephen, “could he but imagine the present mildness of my carnal desires with regard
to Mrs. Wogan, he would not fear for his harem” [292].
While this is internal monologue rather than a diary entry, it is an interesting moment
because it seems to refer back, without explicit comment, to the deep sexual “stirrings”
that had earlier made him consider the possibility of making use of the antiaphrodisiac
qualities of opium, the “devilish suggestion” that he seems to have accepted despite him-
self. The fact that he observes this privately suggests that, at least unconsciously, he is
justifying to himself his return to opium. After all, the drug has done its purported job,
although he may indeed have exaggerated to himself the extent of his sexual desire in
order to make the suggestion to himself in the first place.
The final mention of laudanum, late in the novel, again occurs in the diary and again
is in reference to Herapath, his unconscious enabler: “and tonight I shall allow myself just
­twenty-five drops, which I shall drink to Herapath’s felicity. I am much attached to that
young man […]” (313). At least a part of his friendly attachment may be an effect of the
convenient medical example of a casual opium consumer that he has provided to Maturin.
Of course, the ­twenty-five drops that he allows himself here are a far cry from the nightly
four hundred drops that he consumed in the earlier novel Post Captain at the nadir of his
romantic unhappiness. However, with the return to the drug, he seems well on his way to
dependence, and he has managed to avoid a conscious consideration of the problem by
mentioning it in his diary only after he has begun using laudanum once again.
Maturin’s ­self-medicating in response to emotional pain stands in striking contrast
to his lack of anesthetics in one of the sequence’s most remarkable episodes: his perfor-
mance of autosurgery in HMS Surprise. In this episode of more purely physical urgency,
he wavers neither as physician nor as patient as he performs a feat of autosurgery so aston-
ishing that it strains credulity, just as Captain Aubrey’s string of naval victories against
the odds does so. Both are masters of their physical realms, of their fields of professional
discipline. Through the contrast of this mastery against Maturin’s private struggles with
opium, O’Brian illustrates the complexity of the modern subject in its various roles. Ironi-
cally, before the advent of modern surgical anesthesia in the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, opium was commonly used. But, of course, in this case, Maturin, a confirmed opium
eater, must remain alert enough to perform the surgery: patient and physician share a
body. The surgery is to remove a bullet lodged “right under the pericardium—flattened
and deflected” (351). Maturin has received the bullet from the lover and “keeper” (to use
the parlance of the time) of the ­long-time object of his sexual obsession, Diana Villiers.
The operation, therefore, combines the private and the public in this way as well.
114   The Body in Theory

In order to perform the surgery, Maturin must demonstrate mastery over multi-
ple disciplines: not only must he understand medicine and surgical procedures, but also
he must be a master of design, as he creates a system of mirrors to be able to see during
the operation as well as a special curved “extractor” that allows him to remove the bullet.
Most of all, however, he maintains an almost superhuman physical discipline to be able to
tolerate the pain while keeping his hands steady. Jack Aubrey, meanwhile, offers to assist
in the operation and nearly faints from his astonishment: “Blood he had seen, to be sure;
but not blood, not this cold, deliberate ooze in the slow track of the searching knife and
probe. Nor had he heard anything like the grind of the demilune on living bone, his head
bent low not to obscure Stephen’s view in the mirror” (353). Maturin, himself, maintains
his professional discipline to the end even as he faints away from loss of blood:
“You took the time, M’Alister?” he asked.
“­Twenty-three minutes just.”
“Slow ….” His voice trailed away […] [354].
This amazing feat contributes to the legend of his medical powers even as the necessity of
the surgery—a result of his sexual desire—reveals the internal struggles that undermine
this authority. By making Maturin’s performance in the case nearly unbelievable, O’Brian
heightens this contrast between the disciplined professional and the flawed subject, the
site of both being the body.
In this case of a physical operation, both the professional hands that perform it and
the opened chest upon which it is performed are part of the same body, but structurally
this case is analogous to the ­self-prescribing physician or the ­self-analyzing diarist inter-
rogating the subject/patient who also occupies the same body. In both cases, the body is
objectified and subjected to discipline, but while the recumbent physical patient must
surrender the hidden bullet, the “confessing” subject might resist and deceive. In fact, the
incredibility of the physical operation reveals the impossibility of professional objectivity
in both cases: just as the surgeon feels the same pain as the patient, the flawed physician/
diarist who aspires to ­self-discipline through ­self-analysis suffers from the same addic-
tion as the flawed subject. Both analyst and subject are flawed because, ultimately, the
relationship between them exposes a problem with the Cartesian mind/body paradigm:
the body is always there, and it is always shaping the mind.

Works Cited
Burney, Frances. The Journal and Letters. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Green-
blatt, 10th edition, vol. C, Norton, 2018, pp. 940–58.
De Quincey, Thomas. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 3. AMS Press, 1968.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, ­Vintage-Random House, 1979.
_____. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, vol. 1, Vintage, 1990.
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Beacon Press, 1963.
O’Brian, Patrick. Desolation Island. Norton, 1973.
_____. H.M.S. Surprise. Norton, 1978.
_____. Master and Commander. Norton, 1970.
_____. Post Captain. Norton, 1972.
_____. The Wine Dark Sea. Norton, 1993.
Young, Michael Cochise. “The True Hero of the Tale: De Quincey’s Confessions and Affective Autobiograph-
ical Theory.” Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, edited by Robert Lance Snyder, University of Okla-
homa Press, 1985, pp. 54–71
 Ego Portrait
­Self-Photography
as Symptom in Contemporary
Technoculture1
Chris Vanderwees

What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible is the gaze
that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the
gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the
instrument through which light is embodied and through which—if you
will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am
­photo-graphed.
—Jacques Lacan, Book XI

And the bodies are in front of screens.

—The Invisible Committee

Introduction
I am interested in the subject’s simultaneous ­self-identification and ­self-effacement
in the selfie, and, thus, I posit the selfie as a symptom whereby the subject may reproduce
his or her own image in order to maintain a sense of selfhood in the rapid overproduc-
tion of signs, which liquidates symbolic efficiency in cyberspace. Let me invoke a seminal
work on photography, Camera Lucida, in which Roland Barthes describes the moment
when one stands before the camera prior to the release of the shutter: “the photograph
(the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither
subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (14). I am particu-
larly interested in this subtle moment of the subject’s becoming an object for the self. It is
a moment of fantasy and of anticipation of the object in its becoming.
So what is happening for the subject in terms of the fantasy in the continuous repro-
duction and circulation of the self in the selfie? The subject becomes object. This is what
occurs in the event of every photograph. The photograph objectifies the subject. In a
­self-portrait, the subject becomes object to its own self. The subject ­self-objectifies in
the act of mediating its own body’s image in the photograph. In this sense, the recent
technocultural phenomenon of the selfie has emerged as a widespread phenomenon
of ­self-objectification for others and in relation to an Other. In the selfie, the subject

115
116   The Body in Theory

becomes object to the Other. For clarification, when I refer to the Other with a capital
“O,” I am referring to the Other of the symbolic, the designation of radical difference that
cannot be integrated with identification. Because each subject experiences the Other in a
distinct way, the Other also refers to another subject in his or her radical difference, the
particularity that remains unactualized, and the symbolic order that mediates the com-
munication with this subject. The Other is overdetermined and is not known in advance.
Thus, the Other is of the unconscious. I also refer to the other with a small “o,” which is
the other of the imaginary and of identification, the projection of the ego as specular
image, or simply the other as another subject. The other might be understood as the sub-
ject’s projected alter ego who desires what the subject desires.
Throughout this essay, I also deploy “technoculture” or the prefix “techno” to place
emphasis on the Western subject’s enmeshment with advanced communication net-
works. Technoculture conveys the growing and shifting processes of technological medi-
ation and governance in everyday social interactions. Constance Penley and Andrew
Ross, for instance, refer to technoculture as actually existing media and “new cultural
technologies [that] have penetrated deepest, and where the environments they have cre-
ated seem almost second nature to us” (xii). Historian James Hall suggests that within
contemporary technoculture, it is “[s]­elf-portraiture [that] has become the defining
visual genre of our confessional age: the sheer volume of contemporary ­self-portraits,”
he writes, “defies enumeration” (7). Although Hall traces the genre of ­self-portraiture to
its roots in the Middle Ages through to Rembrandt’s work and beyond, the advent of “sel-
fie” as a neologism, as Oxford Dictionary’s 2013 word of the year, designates some distinc-
tive technosocial variance in the subject’s rehearsal of photographic ­self-representation
(Brumfield). A selfie is a picture that one takes of the self, but unlike previous methods of
photographic ­self-portraiture, the selfie is inextricably linked to the convergence of digi-
tal cameras, smartphones, and social media platforms.
Popular media commentators often deride the ongoing production of selfies, crit-
icizing this social behavior as a vapid endeavor of personal enjoyment, a lowly cultural
form of surface ­self-portrayal, or a digital manifestation of narcissistic or exhibitionistic
compulsions. There is even a circulating social anxiety in contemporary news reports on
the growing accidental death toll involving selfies. Media manufacturers circulate bizarre
headlines of a rising accidental death toll that is supposedly a direct result of reckless
­self-photography involving the smartphone: “SELFIES ARE KILLING MORE PEOPLE
THAN SHARK ATTACKS” (Sandhu). Not unlike Ovid’s portrayal of Narcissus drown-
ing in the pool of water, this media narrative attempts to convey the dangers involved with
the subject’s attention to the ­self-image on the screen. This media narrative repeatedly sug-
gests that the subject’s desire to represent some idealized or extreme version of the self to
the Other is likely to lead to harmful effects, if not an untimely death. There is, however, a
sort of sadistic, ­tongue-in-cheek pleasure embedded in these media stories for readers to
discover. The popular tabloid narrative of divine retribution for ­self-absorption exagger-
ates the prevalence of these deaths with sensational headlines, making for good “clickbait”
and thus driving advertising revenue for media organizations while readers enjoy mor-
bid fascination with the other’s apparent death by excessive technocultural pleasure in the
self. A group of researchers at Carnegie Melon University is carefully recording data sur-
rounding the occurrence of “killfies,” a neologism employed in its work towards devel-
oping a safety application that will warn people in “­real-time” whether they are about to
make a dangerous selfie or are approaching a dangerous area (Ore). Media manufacturers
 Ego Portrait (Vanderwees)  117

capitalize on this representation of death as they refashion the myth of Narcissus through
a grim technological anxiety that seeks to regulate the subject’s act of ­self-depiction. Fur-
ther, the narrative that combines the selfie with death targets the existential anxiety of
­life-without-meaning in the era of semiocapitalism, an era awash in an overproduction of
psychical stimulation via new media. Here is death as kitsch. The “killfie” has now become
a common tabloid expression for deaths involving smartphone technology. The neologism
implies some sadistic pleasure in the death of the other.
A sample from Daniel Menaker’s New York Times ­Op-Ed will suffice as an expres-
sion of this general disdain for the encroaching replacement of the ­face-to-face with the
­face-to-interface:
Many “selfies” look like their subjects are singing an aria or welcoming a guest or hailing a cab,
because of the necessarily outstretched arm that precedes the hand that precedes the finger that
clicks the picture, often after a previous, poorly aimed picture of one’s feet or something more
embarrassing. Delete. I don’t know. It seems like an embarrassing word to me, on the ­baby-talk
side of talk, and destined for the etymological trash basket. […] Soon enough “selfies” will be
history and we’ll be on to something more absurd. In fact, it must already be happening: Peo-
ple asking other people to take pictures of them taking pictures of themselves and posting the
­Möbius-like result.2
Menaker’s comments imply that the selfie does not warrant serious consideration, sug-
gesting as they do that selfies are disposable, a fleeting fad, unfortunate kitsch com-
monly associated with the ­self-promotion of American celebrities and the adoration of
their adolescent fans and, further, that there is some kind of regression at play in the
­selfie-taker. His comments also suggest that there is something silly and embarrassing
in being witness to the other’s narcissistic pleasure in its own image. In Menaker’s com-
ments, there is even contempt directed at the other’s enjoyment of this regression. After
all, the word “selfie” is close to the word “selfish,” and, as a Lacanian, I would encour-
age the reader also to hear the syllabic split of the word into “sell” and “fee” to emphasize
the ways in which these images of the self become bound up with advertising, commod-
ity fetishism, and neoliberal capitalism. This form of photography is a demand from the
other for recognition and love as ­selfie-takers paradoxically enjoy themselves as objects
while simultaneously becoming vulnerable under the gaze of the Other. And yet per-
haps this photographic trend is too easily dismissed for its aesthetics of apparent frivol-
ity. There is actually surprisingly little academic writing on the topic.3 Hence, it is worth
devoting psychoanalytic reflection to the selfie in order to examine its implications as a
technocultural practice that has become interwoven with everyday life.

Subject as Object as the Desire of the Other

In Québécois French, “selfie” is sometimes translated as either autophoto or égopor-
trait. These French Canadian conversions already do some significant interpretive work.
As a prefix, auto- denotes ­self-reflection, as in “autoanalysis” or “autobiography,” but
also the “automation” of motor and machine and the “automaton,” an uncanny figure,
which may run automatically, repetitiously, and/or unconsciously. Further, the égo- pre-
fix, of course, similarly suggests selfhood but through psychoanalytic notions of con-
scious identifications and narcissism. As a pair, these translations communicate a certain
tension between conscious and unconscious processes in the subject’s production and
118   The Body in Theory

circulation of selfies, a split between the conscious ego and the unconscious fantasy as
caught in technological mediation. Here, I use the terms “self ” and “ego” rather loosely
as relatively synonymous and as understood through Lacan to be the “fictional direc-
tion that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only
asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical
syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality” (“The Mir-
ror Stage” 76). In other words, the self is not a stable construct but is maintained through
a series of defenses, identifications, and desires that are shifting and repeating in pro-
cesses of becoming. Therefore, we might think of the ego itself as a fantasy or maybe, as
Lacan puts it in his first seminar, as “structured exactly like a symptom” (Book I 16).
At the beginning of Seminar XIV, Lacan restates the formula of the neurotic fan-
tasy as ($<>a), the barred subject in relation to the objet petit a (i.e., the unattainable and
unconscious object of desire that results in the subject’s continual and metonymic pur-
suit of the lost object in a futile attempt to fill the lack). This formula is helpful for under-
standing what occurs in the selfie as the subject’s ­self-objectification is always already
contingent on the desire of the Other. “[T]he key to the neurotic position,” says Lacan,
“depends on this close relation to the demand of the Other, in so far as he tries to make
it emerge […] because he is offering himself ” (Book XIV 206). In the selfie, the subject
presents the self to the Other as mediated in the specular image on the screen. Given the
advancement of the ­front-facing camera of the smartphone, there is a technological revi-
sion to the subtle moment that Barthes describes. The subject can now easily and imme-
diately examine the appearance, movement, and pose of the face and body in “real time”
during the attempt to capture the image of the Other’s desire. The subject adapts and
refashions the self, here, taking and retaking images in direct correlation with recogni-
tion from the Other and others who then provide signifiers for the subject’s own desire in
the form of likes, links, looks, lurks, or affectively appropriate emojis.
In this sense, I suggest that it may be useful to posit the selfie as a kind of
­re-enactment of the mirror stage. For Lacan, when the parent holds the infant before
the mirror to observe its own ­self-image, the infant experiences a simultaneous (mis)-
recognition and alienation from the self since the mirror allows the infant to see itself
as itself but also through the externalized gaze of the parent as Other. This experience
results in the subject’s imaginary unification of the body through the specular image or
the ideal ego (also referred to as i[a] as per Lacan’s mathemes). The infant’s primal fan-
tasy of bodily dismemberment caused by its lack of coordination is repressed in an imag-
inary identification with its ­self-image. The mother ratifies this deceptive gestalt for the
infant by performing an act of figurative mirroring before the literal mirror, confirm-
ing the infant’s ­self-image with excitement: “Look at yourself in the mirror! Who’s that?
That’s you!” The child does not simply see itself in the mirror but becomes aware of itself
as object under the gaze of the Other. For Lacan, the gaze is not simply a form of sen-
sory perception in terms of the subject’s ability to look but is also located in the subject’s
perception of the Other’s ability to look back. He refers to the capacity of the external
gaze to turn the subject who is looked at into a kind of picture, an object of the Other’s
desire. The subject externalizes and projects the internal perception of the self outwards.
The self experiences itself as an other through the externalized gaze whereby the subject
of the gaze continuously tries to recuperate an incomprehensible lack. In Lacan’s terms,
the subject identifies with itself through the external gaze as the objet petit a. The mirror
stage also designates the beginning of the infant’s separation from the parents and entry
 Ego Portrait (Vanderwees)  119

into the symbolic as the infant develops an identification with an “I.” Although the sub-
ject always remains split, that is, split between conscious and unconscious processes, the
ego works to form defenses against misrecognition, which “gives rise to an inexhaust-
ible squaring of the ego’s audits” (Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” 78). For Lacan, the subject
as scopic object is always lacking under the gaze of the Other. The objet petit a emerges
from this split between the recognition and misrecognition of the subject in relation to
the Other as the subject attempts to recuperate or compensate for that which would be
lacking. The subject’s ego or sense of a “me” is always split from its shifting identification
with an “I.” At this split, the subject takes up a position to the fundamental fantasy, the
unconscious scene that may stage or structure the neurotic’s relation to and perception
of reality, where meaning revolves around the subject’s stake in the desire of the Other.
“[T]he important point,” writes Lacan, “is that this form [in the mirror] situates the
agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination” (76). Ultimately, the mirror
stage produces the subject’s ego as a necessary fantasy that establishes relations to objects
and structures the experience of social reality.
The child’s experience of the mirror stage is repeated through the subtle moment
of anticipation prior to the subject’s capture of its own image in the act of taking a selfie.
The subject might modify this ­self-representation through the myriad of image-altering
tools that Instagram and other software applications currently provide. Once the desired
image is captured, retouched, and filtered, the subject’s ability to share this image with a
network of others across social media networks provides confirmation of the self through
comments, shares, and likes: “That’s you!” Selfies point to the subject’s persistent nostal-
gia for the loss of the ideal ego, the loss of a ­self-love that the infant enjoyed in the early
narcissism of the mirror stage.
This nostalgia might be understood as what produces the punctum of photog-
raphy, which refers to the subject’s affective encounter with an image that returns the
lack. Barthes also describes the punctum of the photograph as the “sting, speck, cut, lit-
tle hole—and also a cast of the dice” or “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises
me, is poignant to me)” (27). The punctum is a detail in the photograph that triggers the
subject’s projection of a personal wound into the image. In an adaptation of Barthes’s
­well-known statement about the photograph, the selfie might provide the subject with a
sense of “­you-have-been” or “­I-have-been” as mediated not only through the external-
ized gaze of the Other but also through the symbolic confirmation of the self in the oth-
er’s actual interactions with the image. Barthes writes that
[t]he name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: “­That-has-been” […]. […] [W]hat I see
has been here […] and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present,
and yet already deferred. […] I had identified truth and reality in a unique emotion, in which I
henceforth placed the nature—the genius—of Photography, since no painted portrait, suppos-
ing that it seemed “true” to me, could compel me to believe its referent had really existed [77].

Here, Barthes conveys the méconnaissance for the subject who is photographed. The
­selfie-taker’s nostalgia for a lost image is perhaps what causes him or her to continue to take
selfies, all of which are lacking and thus wounding. Not unlike the ­mirror-stage, the sel-
fie produces some element of misrecognition for the subject. “Ultimately,” writes Barthes,
“a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents” (102). The singular selfie
might be understood as only one digital photograph amongst those in an ongoing series,
a growing personal archive interconnected with the archives of others through chains of
120   The Body in Theory

digital linking and association. This archive circulates the subject’s ­self-objectifications
through a broader social media network but also catalogues these images with a new sym-
bolic consistency that provides immediate temporal, geographical, and spatial orientation
through metadata, tagging, and facial recognition software. The subject’s reproduction of
these images results in a continual attempt to cover the lack in being.

Semiocapitalism and the Decline of Symbolic Efficiency

Perhaps maintaining symbolic consistency becomes the subject’s chronic defense
against what several scholars, including Jodi Dean, Michael Horsley, and Slavoj Žižek,
describe as “the decline of symbolic efficiency” in the contemporary mediasphere. What
this means is that the globalized technocultural world of digital networks produces such
an overabundance of arguments and ideas, options and opinions that it becomes incred-
ibly difficult to anchor individual identity or collective meaning in the social imaginary,
a complex network of signifiers that can be described only indirectly, obliquely, and hap-
hazardly. Constituting the world of signification, symbols, and myths that circulate for a
multitude, the social imaginary provides meaning and identity for collectives (groups or
societies) where there would otherwise be a void. It also has the social function of cov-
ering over gaps or that which may be unconscious in the symbolic order for the subject.
From this perspective, “[t]he contemporary setting of electronically mediated subjec-
tivity is one of infinite doubt, ultimate reflexivization” where “[t]here’s always another
option, link, opinion, nuance, or contingency that we haven’t taken into account” (Dean
6). Dean argues that in the contemporary mediasphere, “there is no longer a Master fig-
ure signifier stabilizing meaning, knitting together the chain of signifiers and hindering
tendencies to float off into indeterminacy” (6). Dori Laub gives an impression of a media
environment where such a welter of words and images floods the social imaginary more
generally, depleting the symbolic of its efficiency, resulting in the fragmentation of truth
and the loss of dominant national or cultural narratives: “no unified voice has emerged to
challenge, dispute, and contradict the radically divergent, often mutually exclusive, ver-
sions of reality that are being spouted from different corners of the earth. It is as though
there is no truth and no sense of conviction, a collective uncertainty regarding the verac-
ity of the truth and one’s own experience” (212–13). The decline of symbolic efficiency is
also partially a result of what Franco Berardi calls “semiocapitalism,” a term that desig-
nates the contemporary subject’s experience with digital interfaces and the oversatura-
tion of signs, acceleration of stimuli, and constant attentive stress that dissolves collective
meaning, stability, and solidarity. Under semiocapitalism, the rapid production and cir-
culation of digital narratives reaches such an extent that signifiers become more and
more indeterminate. Overflowing amounts of information become a lack of informa-
tion. When there is too much meaning, it reaches a threshold and becomes meaningless.
I would suggest that just as neoliberal capitalism offloads financial risk and responsibility
from the institution onto the individual, semiocapitalism offloads the risk and responsi-
bility of meaning from the social onto the individual.
The overproduction of signs and symbols and images online also results in the
acceleration and greater indeterminacy of the desire of the Other. Advanced communi-
cation networks distribute such an oversupply of narratives and discourses that the sym-
bolic order fractures into an overdetermination of truths and values. “It’s like the feast of
 Ego Portrait (Vanderwees)  121

information results in a more fundamental starvation,” writes Dean (8). As a result, the
subject might continually repeat the act of photographic ­self-fashioning, reproducing the
­self-image at a rapid pace in order to sustain selfhood in the diminishing sense of sym-
bolic efficiency online. This repetition of the mirror stage enables the subject to expe-
rience temporary cohesion and symbolic consistency of self through the creation and
identification with the image. Like a pen used for writing, the camera is capable of mak-
ing a mark, a record of fleeting moments, a reproduction of the ­self-image in the selfie.
If the selfie is to be understood as a symptom, these images would be, according to
Lacan, “already inscribed in the writing process” and must have a “relation to a signifying
structure that determines them” (“Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching” 371). It may help to
recall that the etymology of photography comes from the Greek roots photos, or “light,” and
graphé, or “making lines” or “drawing,” literally meaning to write with light. Eduardo Cadava
provides a starting point for thinking about the psyche and its enmeshment with the media-
tion of the camera, and it is here that my thoughts turn to the topology of the ­Möbius-strip:
[I]f there can be no camera or photograph that does not have a psychic origin […] then there
can be no psyche without photography, without a process of writing and reproduction. To say
that everything within the psyche begins with writing and reproduction is to say that the psy-
che begins with photography. If the psyche and photography are machines for the production
of images, however, what is produced is not simply any image, but an image of ourselves. And
we are most ourselves when, not ourselves, we are an image or a photograph [100].
Certainly, Freud provides us with metaphors for the unconscious through photography
and early darkroom processes in his works, but Cadava’s words, here, suggest something
more than metaphor in that the subject’s psyche and photography might be understood
in terms of a mutually constitutive relation.4 Beyond the mirror, the subject may main-
tain selfhood at a certain threshold of constant recasting of the ego on the smartphone.
Jean Baudrillard might characterize this repetitive recasting as a variation of hyperreal-
ity whereby the digital self has become more real than the phenomenal self. “More real
than the real,” writes Baudrillard, “that is how the real is abolished” (81). Baudrillard does
not refer to the Lacanian “real,” here, but rather to a sense of reality that is lost in the copy
of the object or representation that substitutes for reality, which becomes more authentic
than the original. Using a similar logic, Barthes writes that “[a]ll I look like is other pho-
tographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real
or mental” (102). Selfies offer the impression of a “reality” that may have only occurred a
second ago, giving a sense of immediacy and spontaneity as the subject’s colloquial life
unfolds through images and comments and likes. For Lacan, it is through the Other that
the subject experiences desire, which means both the desire to be the object of anoth-
er’s desire and the desire for recognition by another. This stockpiling of images acts as an
evolving record of the self as it comes to be through the desire of online others.
In an era that might be defined through a decline of symbolic efficiency, the égoportrait
may actually function through what Lacan refers to as the sinthôme, i.e., as the repetition
of a symptom that holds the subject’s reality together. Rather than continually experienc-
ing the suffering that a symptom may produce, the subject gains ­know-how regarding his
or her personal suffering and transforms it for more generative purposes. The shift from
symptom to sinthôme conveys the subject’s move from disidentification with the symptom
to identification. This identification provides the subject with symbolic consistency and
an imaginary sense of unity. In the sinthôme, the subject may even be able to enjoy what
is gained from his or her knowledge of the symptom in its repetition compulsion. Lacan’s
122   The Body in Theory

sinthôme also conveys several associations including ­synth-homme (artificial man), which
implies that part of the symptom is a fictional ­self-creation. In other words, the selfie may
act as a suture for the subject’s existential lack, resulting from the fragmentation and deple-
tion of the symbolic order in contemporary technoculture. “[T]he sinthôme,” says Lacan, “is
what enables the Borromean link to be mended […] [s]hould the symbolic thereby come
free. This enables the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to go on holding together, even
though here none of them is actually holding on to any of the others anymore” (Book XXIII
77). In the sinthôme, the subject is somewhat conscious of the fantasy involved in the repet-
itive behavior for the Other, and yet he or she nevertheless continues to engage in the repet-
itive behavior that sustains the fantasy. The selfie as symptom allows the subject to shore up
the self for itself as a kind of suture that must perpetually be restitched. The jouissance in
the performance of the self for itself acts as “a binding of enjoyment to a certain symbolic
formation which assures a minimum of consistency to ­being-in-the-world” (Žižek, “The
Symptom” 425). The selfie as sinthôme functions as a screen for the subject’s lack, but it may
also generate anxiety through the uncanny misrecognition of the Other’s gaze. Lacan refers
to the “screen” in the context of semblance and mimicry:
the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double,
an envelope, a ­thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through
this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death, and
it might be said that it is with the help of this doubling of the other, or of oneself, that is realized
the conjunction from which proceeds the renewal of beings in reproduction [Book XI 107].
The smartphone ­image-screen mediates between the gaze of the Other and the subject of
representation. Through the égoportrait’s reenactment of the mirror stage, the subject can
say, “Look at me!” or receive confirmation from the social media other, “That’s you!” but
he or she may struggle to produce the “I” with each inability to fully capture or recognize
the self in the desire of the Other so as to keep oneself afloat in the datastream.

Notes
1. A draft of this chapter was read at the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups conference, On Fantasy, in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada in July 2017. An earlier version of this revised chapter was also previously published
in Lacunae: APPI International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, vol. 15, 2017, pp. 95–111.
2. Often made reference to by Lacan, a Möbius strip is simply created by taking a strip of paper, twisting
it, and taping the two ends together, forming a topological surface that subverts usual ways of representing
space. Although the strip may appear to have two sides at any point, it is actually a single continuous surface,
which points to the problem with distinct binaristic notions of inside and outside, self and other, conscious
and unconscious processes.
3. See Uzlaner.
4. Freud himself employed photography as a metaphor for the unconscious on several occasions but most
notably in a 1912 text, “A Note on the Unconscious in ­Psycho-Analysis”: “A rough but not inadequate analogy
to this supposed relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be drawn from the field of ordinary pho-
tography. The first stage of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the
‘negative process,’ and some of these negatives which have held good in the examination are admitted to the
‘positive process’ ending in the picture” (264).

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by R. Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by S. F. Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Berardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the ­Post-Alpha Generation.
Minor Compositions, 2009.
 Ego Portrait (Vanderwees)  123

Brumfield, Ben. “Selfie Named Word of the Year for 2013.” CNN, 20 Nov. 2013, www.cnn.com/2013/11/19/
living/­selfie-word-of-the-year/index.html.
Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton University Press, 1997.
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Polity Press, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. “A Note on the Unconscious in ­Psycho-analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 12, edited and translated by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1958,
pp. 255–66.
Hall, James. The ­Self-portrait: A Cultural History. Thames and Hudson, 2014.
Horsley, Mark. The Dark Side of Prosperity: Late Capitalism’s Culture of Indebtedness. Routledge, 2016.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.”
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, edited and translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 75–81.
_____. “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, edited and translated
by Bruce Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 364–83.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller,
translated by John Forrester, Norton, 1988.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by
­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1998.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV: The Logic of Fantasy. Translated by Cormac Gallagher, 30
June 2019, www.lacaninireland.com/web/­wp-content/uploads/2010/06/­THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-
LACAN-XIV.pdf.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthôme. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by
A. R. Price, Polity Press, 2016.
Laub, Dori. “September 11, 2001—An Event Without a Voice.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11, edited by Judith
Greenberg, University of Nebraska Press, 2003, pp. 204–16.
Menaker, Daniel. “Taking Our Selfies Seriously.” New York Times, 23 November 2013, www.nytimes.
com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/­taking-our-selfies-seriously.html.
Ore, Jonathan. “Researchers Build Tool to Help Prevent ‘­Selfie-deaths.’” CBC News, 16 November 2016, www.
cbc.ca/news/technology/­research-selfie-deaths-1.3858271.
Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross. “Introduction.” Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Andrew
Ross, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. viii–xvii.
Sandhu, Serina. “Selfies Are Killing More People Than Shark Attacks.” Independent, 22 September 2015,
www.independent.co.uk/­arts-entertainment/photography/­selfies-are-killing-more-people-than-shark-
attacks-10512449.html.
Uzlaner, Dmitry. “The Selfie and the Intolerable Gaze of the Other.” International Journal of Applied Psychoan-
alytic Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017, pp. 282–94.
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Symptom.” Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Elizabeth Wright,
Blackwell, 1992, pp. 423–27.
_____. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 1999.
 Social Media, Biopolitical Surveillance,
and Disciplinary Social Control
Aggregating Data to Examine Docile Bodies
Michael Loadenthal

There is the ­brain-machine interface program. It measures the processes in

the brain in hopes of detecting deceptive intent. […] [It’s] part of a coun-
terterrorism initiative and the heart of our strategy is ­bio-surveillance. […]
We’re mining health databases […] for the human ID program. We use a
variety of biometric technologies that focus on body parts, face identifi-
cation, human kinematics. It’s amazing what we can tell from the human
stride. Personality, intention, pathology, criminality. All from scrutiniz-
ing one’s gait.
—Dr. Max Milkman, The West Wing

Sometimes we, as citizens, are all too often complicit in the erasing of
boundaries between our public and private lives via social media. And
we may also find ourselves unwitting and often unwilling captors to algo-
rithms that invasively track our every click. In consideration of this, I will
ask Congress to authorize a new cabinet office, the Department of Digi-
tal Technology, to bring enlightened oversight to our now hyperconnected
world. Via the Internet, it has become too easy to stir anger and fear where
none is deserved.
—Dr. Tom Kirkman, Designated Survivor

Introduction
The modern statecraft of repression, inclusive of its legislative, judicial, carceral,
rhetorical, and discursive acts, constitutes a hybrid regime of social control. Accord-
ing to Foucault, manifestations of power and their resulting means of social control
develop genealogically—one shifting towards another and then changing again. In his
­multi-decade scholarship, Foucault explores three primary models of power: sovereign,
disciplinary, and biopower. In their discussion of these three models, Resistance Studies
theorists Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen note that “Foucault outlines different forms
of power. Among these are: (1) the forbidding power of law, violence and sovereignty;
(2) the disciplinary power of discourses and institutions; and (3) the nurturing power
that organizes social life and populations (biopower)” (Lilja and Vinthagen 112). The

124
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  125

monarchical and disciplinary forms of power serve as a basis for understanding how the
mechanics of social control function through emergent technologies and the social prac-
tices they generate. When we add to them Foucault’s third form of power, biopower, these
three forms serve as a basis on which to ground the current discussion and are especially
important to name and distinguish as they have numerous effects on the governed and at
least as many interpretations by scholars.
Broadly speaking, power is first chiefly embodied in the sovereign—a king or an
emperor. In Foucault’s model, most prominently featured in Discipline and Punish, the
State sovereign demonstrates its propensity and readiness to enact ritualized, brutal, and
often theatrical punishment upon the judged (i.e., monarchical or sovereign power),
eventually adapting to sanitize such violence while manufacturing compliance with the
social order (i.e., disciplinary power). Foucault argues that disciplinary power produces
a “relation of strict subjugation” (138), and through regimes of surveillance, this disci-
plinary discourse is internalized amongst the population as the citizenry is made con-
scious of its gaze and embodies its omnipresence, presuming an ­ever-present disciplinary
authority who sees all. The result of the citizenry’s internalization of disciplinary control
is a population of “subjected and practiced […] docile bodies” (138). Social control is the
productive process wherein our surveilled bodies are encultured to this subjugation.
Following these stages of sovereign and disciplinary power, Foucault’s notion of
biopower emerges. This essay begins from an understanding of biopower—the produc-
tion of properly disciplined bodies and the regulatory control of the population. Biopol-
itics, derived from biopower, represents a “technology of power” organizing human life
to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize” the State’s “right to decide
life and death” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 135–36). Foucault explains biopower as
“the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species
became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Security, Terri-
tory, Population 1). As Foucault remarks, “mechanisms of power are an intrinsic part of
all these relations” (2) as there are no relationships outside of power—not even in one’s
relationship to technology or embodiment. Biopolitics is therefore a particularly individ-
ualized framework to understand collective social control through individualized bodies
and their envelopments with ­juridical-caerceral State power.
Building on Foucault, Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille
Mbembe defines State power in terms of sovereignty, writing that “the ultimate expres-
sion of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate
who may live and who must die” (“Necropolitics” 11–12). Mbembe continues, explaining
that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality” (18). Mbembe’s necro-
politics—the fostering of bodies that are neither alive nor dead but suspended in juridi-
cal limbo—and Foucault’s biopolitics are complementary frames for understanding the
interplay between power and the body, as both seek to understand power’s productive,
incapacitating, and destructive potentialities contained within laws, practices, institu-
tions, discourses, and States.
What is key in this genealogy—from sovereign to disciplinary and finally to bio-
power—is that while these emergent forms of powers emanate from different time peri-
ods, they “did not replace each other” (Laersson et al. 9–10). Instead, these forms of
power—sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower—serve as malleable and amorphous forms
of power that can be adapted and combined for the ultimate purpose of controlling the
social body. Moreover, scholars such as W.J.T. Mitchell have argued that the borders
126   The Body in Theory

between the sovereign and the disciplinary are vague and function in conjunction with
one another or that they are merely two views of the same mechanism (“The Specta-
cle Today” 575–76; Picture Theory 327). My analysis adopts Foucault’s models as refer-
ence points, not as stops along a genealogical footpath. In his own theorizing, Foucault
notes that biopower has existed alongside—and contemporary to—the prior modalities
of power, underscoring the superimposition of the repressive and ­pre-modern (sover-
eign) and the more modern and productive (biopolitical) natures of power.
Whereas Foucault sought to explain how these systems emerged and declined, the
current discussion locates sovereign, disciplinary, and ­bio-centric forms of power in a
variety of contemporary instances of surveillance, data collection, and social control.
Despite Foucault’s evolutionary intent, his models remain a sharp tool for analysis even if
one disregards the chronology. The discussion that follows will examine how social con-
trol and docility are fostered with the aid of surveillance and data technologies. Through
an examination of social media, facial recognition, geolocation, and Social Network
Analysis, I will focus on how a technological society produces Foucault’s “docile bodies”
and how participation in digital networks submits the individual to a ritualized, biopolit-
ical examination.

Foucault’s Modalities of Social Control

Within Foucault’s genealogy of social control, as the monarch’s actions became less
politically and economically expedient, the ruler began to supplement his public dis-
plays of sovereign power with those designed to encourage ­self-policing. Such a transi-
tion—from the publicly brutal to the covertly disciplinary—was accomplished with an
eye towards the State’s avoiding the perception of being a tyrant or brute. Foucault argues
the following:
At the movement of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still assumes with the Emperor
the old aspect of the power of [monarchical] spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the
same time a usurper of the ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into
a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sover-
eignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in
the daily exercise of surveillance […] [Discipline and Punish 217].
Foucault reminds us that even a fully formed disciplinary power apparatus relies on (or
recalls the memory of) prior forms of spectacular brutality. Mbembe agrees that disci-
plinary subjugation is predicated upon the ability of the population to be reminded of
earlier sovereign might. He writes, “The new systems of security build on various ele-
ments of prior regimes […] and incorporate them, on a nanocellular level, into the tech-
niques of the age of genomics and the war on terror” (Critique of Black Reason 22).
As spectacles of cruelty are supplemented with those casting the State in a less
barbaric light, the summative effect remains—the supremacy of State power. Foucault
returns to this moment: “The transition from the public execution, with its spectacu-
lar rituals, its art mingled with the ceremony of pain, to the penalties of prisons buried
in architectural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations […] is the transi-
tion from one art of punishing to another, no less skillful one. It is a technical mutation”
(Discipline and Punish 257). In Foucault’s genealogy, this shift occurred over a centu-
ry’s time, beginning in the ­mid-eighteenth century. Foucault describes the use of chain
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  127

gangs—“great spectacle[s] of the public execution”—noting that gangs and executions

were abolished in the ­mid-nineteenth century to “break with these public rites” and to
force the necropolitical transportation of prisoners “under the veil of administrative
decency” (254, 263). Once the sovereign—in modernity understood through the notion
of the State­—has established itself as the enactor of laws, incarcerator of bodies, and exe-
cutioner of the condemned, it can cease (for a time) to display its barbarity, as the mere
nod to its image serves as an ample cautionary, disciplining disincentive.1
Violence and law share malleable borders under the auspices of State authority. Fou-
cault’s ­disincentive-driven disciplinary power allows the State to wield control while
avoiding the violent unmasking inherent in public punishment. Foucault’s notions of
power presuppose a number of key points.2 Foucault argues that power is not “something
that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away;
power is [instead] exercised from innumerable points” (History of Sexuality 94). The fos-
tering of a properly disciplined populace is an act of governmentality par excellence as
it seeks to produce, maintain, and control a citizenry within the bounds of liberal state-
hood. Governmentality, as described by Judith Butler, is the means through which “polit-
ical power manages and regulates populations and goods […] the main way state power
is vitalized” (51). This “art of government” (Foucault, “Governmentality” 92), which But-
ler describes as “a diffuse set of strategies and tactics,” aims to integrate the citizenry
into the economy, bureaucracy, discourses, and institutions and to replicate their logic
throughout social relationships regulated by and outside of State control (52). According
to Butler, both governmentality and disciplinary mechanisms have increased as sover-
eign power has receded (51–52). While the State’s “vitality” once emanated from the mon-
arch and its legitimacy, as this singular sovereign declines in modernity, governmentality
serves as the vitalizing source for statehood.

Social Media in a Disciplinary Society

Using Foucault’s disciplinary framework, we can better understand the micropolit-
ical mechanisms through which an environment of omnipresence is established. Cryp-
tographer and security expert Bruce Schneier has spent much of his life exploring the
relationship between security and society and writes that the awareness of surveillance
leads to individuals’ ­self-disciplining as Foucault noted:
We know that surveillance has a chilling effect on freedom. People change their behavior when
they live their lives under surveillance. They are less likely to speak freely and act individually.
They ­self-censor. They become conformist. This is obviously true for government surveillance,
but is true for corporate surveillance as well. We simply aren’t as willing to be our individual
selves when others are watching [“Surveillance Kills Freedom by Killing Experimentation”].
There are obviously a multitude of means through which human beings, communities,
and networks are surveilled by the State, corporations, and other citizens, but let us begin
with social media, a contemporary avenue of surveillance.
Social media/networking as a source of investigation and mapping relies on its
expansive use within the population. Below are the top social networking sites (exclud-
ing those based on ­one-on-one communications such as texting platforms) according to
a 2019 marketing review (Lua). Listed next to the platform name is its number of Monthly
Active Users:
128   The Body in Theory

1. Facebook (2.23 billion)

2. YouTube (1.9 billion)
3. Instagram (1 billion)
4. Tumblr (642 million)
5. Tik Tok (500 million)
6. Twitter (335 million)
7. Reddit (330 million)
8. LinkedIn (294 million)
9. Snapchat (255 million)
10. Pinterest (250 million)

Amongst these ten platforms are more than 7.8 billion users with a current world popu-
lation of 7.7 billion.3 With this scope, how does the body exist within digitally mediated
social networks, and how does our participation within these networks serve as a means
of biopolitical surveillance and the fostering of docile bodies within a disciplinary soci-
ety? For Foucault, the producing of docility relies on “uninterrupted, constant coercion,
supervising” (Discipline and Punish 137), which I aim to show in the following examples.
For starters, on the most plainly obvious level, we know that law enforcement,
even at the local level, is widely monitoring social media networks and mining them
for intelligence. In 2016, it was revealed that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allowed
more than 500 law enforcement agencies to monitor their protest coverage in real time
(Cagle; Conarck). A 2014 study concluded that ­eighty-one percent of law enforcement
“actively use social media as a tool in investigation” and that this number had increased
­twenty-five percent in the previous two years (LexisNexis Risk Solutions). This data is
utilized through traditional investigative means as well as through more advanced data
mining practices involving artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and
(big) data science.
Some local agencies, such as the Chicago police, have tracked social media using
technology designated for federal law enforcement (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation) or developed for use by foreign intelligence agencies (e.g., the Central Intelli-
gence Agency, the National Security Agency), which are legally barred from spying on
United States citizens (Barrett, “CIA Aided Program to Spy on U.S. Cellphones”; Rup-
penthal). The National Security Agency has even taken to monitoring the consumption
of pornographic material of some of their targets to build dossiers useful for leverage,
noting the targets’ “vulnerabilities” in such phrases as “online promiscuity,” “glamourous
lifestyle,” “may misdirect donations,” “charges exorbitant speaking fees,” and “misinter-
prets Qur’an” (Greenwald et al.). While the surveillance capabilities of these systems are
expansive, they soon will be able to adequately anticipate social unrest through social
media activity. According to a 2018 study funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory,
“social network structures” were being used to “generate predictions about [anti–Trump]
protest occurrence[s]” (Renaud et al. 267). The study concludes that, with preparation,
the 2016 ­post-election demonstrations—for example, airport blockades opposing the
­so-called “Muslim travel ban”—could have been predicted through analyzing Twitter, as
“civil unrest is associated with information cascades or activity bursts in social media”
(267). While the military funding of this study may be cause for concern, the conclusions
reached are far from shocking.
The passive monitoring of social protest by police is certainly nothing new, although
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  129

the way it has become routine and unremarkable is an emerging reality. In an embarrass-
ing screenshot oversight, a 2018 Tweet by the Massachusetts State Police reporting on
gas explosions showed that while police mapped the utility malfunctions, their browser
bookmarks included webpages for local ­left-leaning organizations, including the Face-
book pages for Mass Action Against Police Brutality, Coalition to Organize, and Mobilize
Boston Against Trump as well as the website Resistance Calendar, which scheduled local
progressive and anti–Trump events.4 The fact that these are saved bookmarks is grounds
to assume the police were regularly monitoring these online communities (Betancourt).
Undercover police often post on social media to ensnare their targets. According
to one investigation, seventy percent of police departments surveyed do not have inter-
nal regulations guiding online activity (Hill), while another study put this number at
­forty-eight percent (LexisNexis Risk Solutions). Other investigations have shown local,
state, and federal agencies—including the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Taskforce—creating fake
social media accounts to monitor and interfere with social protest campaigns (Neef ).
Surveillance of social media is, of course, not limited to deputized law enforcement. A
variety of corporations, including energy companies and banks, are monitoring social
media to disrupt and suppress social protest campaigns, often collaborating with police
(Brown et al.; Ahmed; Federman; Thalen). Companies such as Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter have regularly assisted police in their investigations, turning over data and
tracking demonstrators on request (Cagle). In sum, in their efforts to observe and dis-
rupt social protest, both law enforcement and corporate entities monitor, mine, and con-
tribute to social media exchanges to generate actionable intelligence and collect data for
archiving and later analysis.

Examining Networks through Social Media

Despite a wide acknowledgment that social media functions as a site of surveillance,
consumers use these products and services with increasing dependency. Platforms such
as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram rely on users’ constant expansion and confirma-
tion of their networks, creating data points and invasive sites for surveillance. The desire
to participate in social media exemplifies Foucault’s “normalizing gaze” (Discipline and
Punish 184), forcing the poster to conform to proscribed social, political, and discursive
standards, and, in doing so, demonstrates the willingness to trade privacy for visibility
and autonomy for social acknowledgment. Through the digital data points we create, the
surveillance of our lives becomes predicated on deriving and classifying knowledge from
the body, as individuals and their preferences, fears, likes, and quirks become the objects
of analysis.
The products of these digital lives have at least two audiences: those whom we
intend, such as “followers” and friends, and those whom we do not intend but of whom
we are nonetheless aware, such as governments and corporations. For the latter, our digi-
tal activities become a form of examination, “a ritualized knowledge gathering activity in
which case files are built out of the ­often-mundane details of people’s lives” (Staples 27).
This examination is a constant occurrence, obscured from our view, and a key element
of social control. To be observed, measured, evaluated, and compared produces a doc-
ile subject in the clinic, factory, and school. As Foucault notes, “The examination com-
bines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It
130   The Body in Theory

is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to quantify, to classify and to

punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them
and judges them” (Discipline and Punish 184). While Foucault calls the school an “appara-
tus of uninterrupted examination” (186), social media extends the purview of the exam-
ination exponentially.
The technology actualizes the sharing of information and having the popularity
of that material measured in digital engagement such as “likes” and “retweets.” These
engagements can be quantified and displayed as “human capital”: as what Foucault, dis-
cussing genetic data, describes as components “made up of innate elements and other,
acquired elements” (Birth of Biopolitics 227). Just as a genetically privileged individual
may desire to procreate with someone of similar stock, so too do friendships and kinships
result from surrounding oneself online with popularity and name recognition. This man-
ner of examination and evaluation—ascribing value from digital metrics—is permanent
and public, serving as a “ceremony of […] objectification” (Discipline and Punish 187). If
one day an individual becomes a celebrity, the record of that individual’s ­pre-superstar
life exists on servers, waiting to be aggregated.
As a result of the market’s saturated adoption of select technology platforms such
as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, we consensually facilitate easy comparison of our
­user-produced data across platforms, competing to generate more than the average num-
ber of “likes,” more than the average number of friends, etc. The use of these platforms by
individual citizens produces metrics tailored for the evaluation of their embodied con-
troller by States, corporations, and anyone with the desire to “crunch the numbers” and
make sense of the big data produced constantly. The normalization of ­cross-platform
data collection and curation amounts to a disciplinary innovation made possible by the
omnipresence of cell phone, computers, and social media. The advances in technology
serve to further the regimes of surveillance and control that Foucault described by pro-
ducing more data, greater sites for comparison, and a much wider pool of interactions
with each functioning as potential locations for observation and recording.
Foucault argues that disciplinary control requires these comparable metrics, mobi-
lized in the examination, noting that “[discipline is] concerned [with] the correlation of
these elements, the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of com-
parative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to
fix norms” (Discipline and Punish 190). Foucault goes on to make explicit the disciplinary
role the examination plays upon the body, serving to actually produce its physicality:
It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judge-
ment, assures the great disciplinary functions and distribution and classification, maximum
extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimum combination of apti-
tudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic and combinatory individuality
[192].
If we can understand social media as these seriated, comparable, accumulated docu-
ments of which Foucault speaks, then Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the prescribed
method for examination: the “hierarchical surveillance” focused on organizations, classi-
fication, categorization, and mapping.
Network analysis broadly, and SNA especially, allow for the ­micro-macro, struc-
tural, and relational analysis of connectivity amongst an infinite number of nodes such
as persons, locations, institutions, and so forth. SNA relies on observing and making
meaning from patterns of how a particular universe of nodes interacts: who interacts
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  131

with whom, the frequency of interactions, and the clusters of activity. This method of
understanding the structures and functions of networks has become commonplace,
emboldened by the extensive use of ­computer-assisted pattern recognition, data model-
ing, automated ­text-coding, and network visualization technologies (e.g., Medina; Ball).
SNA can produce both quantitative (e.g., a value representing one’s degree of influence
or centrality within a network) and qualitative materials (e.g., visualizations, diagrams,
description) suitable for developing descriptive and causal models, explanations, and
predictions (Schepis). If one is able to identify a target node, then the subject’s activity
can be tracked, and the subject’s interactions can be observed, cataloged, and analyzed
for signatures (United States Joint Forces Command ­III-7–­III-10). A target’s signature
can describe, for example, a friendship and familial network with whom the individual
corresponds over email and the frequency with which he or she does so. This signature
can be used to determine patterns with significance for intelligence policing. The con-
struction and analysis of social networks relies on interrogating how nodes interact in
terms of centrality (i.e., sources and distribution of influence and power) and equivalence
(i.e., substitutability or interchangeability of a node) (Kadushin; Prell). Collectively, with
relatively little historical data, a great deal can be determined about a subject with proper
access to a data source, whether it be Facebook activity, a call record, an email network,
or an actual accounting of In Real Life interactions and associations.
Further enumeration of the size, density, frequency, duration, intensity, clustering,
and internal dynamics (e.g., directional flow of information, decisions, or resources) of
a network can be deduced through computational analysis and visualization, which can
generate a measure of network activity suitable for observation and exploitation. For
example, corporations can adapt and focus their advertisements to select individuals by
identifying trend setters within kinship circles—what a network analysis would term a
node of centrality—or ­nation-states can identify those within an organizational hierar-
chy who are operationally important and target those individuals for observation, dis-
ruption, capture, or assassination. Through the construction of a social network dataset,
one can assess ­command-and-control structures, closeness, expertise, resources, adapt-
ability, and sanctuary (United States Joint Forces Command ­III-I–­III-4; Clark 191–92).
SNA constitutes the explicit mapping of kinship and other forms of human entangle-
ment. It constitutes a gaze, a mechanism of surveillance—the records kept of otherwise
unremarkable interactions. This strategy is not unlike that of the panopticon, Foucault’s
“examination” and “ritualized ­knowledge-gathering,” where in its carceral use, figures
of authority can maintain exhaustive records of individuals’ sleeping, eating, sexual,
and hygiene patterns—noting irregularities, disruptions, and periods that may warrant
increased scrutiny. Data takes a form that is ­kin-centric, organic, informal, and rhizomat-
icly ­non-linear yet interconnected and ­self-replicating (Deleuze and Guattari, ch.1).
The production of these constant, interrelated data points, which collectively consti-
tute an individual’s network, are unavoidable, the net outcome of interaction with social
media. These very technologies are designed to identify new accounts to follow, suggest
further materials to consume, and, through the use of artificial intelligence, continu-
ally offer up new content based on prior tastes. This data gathering, analysis, and utili-
zation should not be understood as an unintentional, downstream consequence of their
intended functioning but are, in fact, integral to the internal logic of these platforms as,
without these algorithmic logics, the user experience would fail. The inevitability of sur-
veillance is a uniquely modern challenge.
132   The Body in Theory

­Bio-Surveillance: Bodies, Faces, and Locations

Law enforcement’s passive monitoring of social media is, to a certain degree, to be
expected. If social media posts are the artifacts of our lives, carefully curated and shared
for public consumption, individuals want their social media to be seen, and thus they
begrudgingly accept police monitoring. Yet, despite users’ consent to share and overshare
their lives, their desire implicitly assumes a voyeuristic yet not securitizing aim (Harcourt
90). While we share on social media consensually for others to observe, we do so assum-
ing their desire to share our joys and challenges, not to improve their surveillance and
facilitate their advertising. If social media posts are the data points individuals consent
to share, what about other elements of data, able to be tracked and cataloged (i.e., meta-
data), which are not intended for accumulated analysis?
Beyond ­user-produced data found on social media, modern existence produces a
growing set of measurable and identifiable features, captured on video or observable in
public space, which can be recorded, tracked, and cataloged. These data points include
fingerprints and palm scans, iris and retina structures and eye movements, voice prints,
facial features, gait patterns, heart and respiration rate detection, skin thermals, DNA,
pheromone and odor analysis, GPS and call record signatures, and physical location
and ­computer-use patterns (Swanlund and Schuurman). In a case that shocked social
movement activists, an individual involved with the 2016 protests against the Dakota
Access Pipeline was arrested three years after the fact due to DNA collected from a cig-
arette located at the demonstration site (Associated Press). These measurable, embod-
ied outputs typify biopolitical surveillance and management: what Mbembe calls “a
new technetronic regime […] [to] measure and archive the uniqueness of individuals
[…] distinguishing parts of the human body [that] become the foundations for new sys-
tems of identification, surveillance, and repression” (Critique of Black Reason 23–24).
Of these technological regimes, facial recognition may be the most widely discussed
and the one with the most far reaching implications with at least ­seventy-five countries
“actively using AI [artificial intelligence] tools such as facial recognition for surveil-
lance” (O’Brien), according to a 2019 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
While the FBI already maintains a database of reportedly 100 million fingerprints,
it is rapidly expanding this database with the integration of a new biometric. The FBI’s
Next Generation Identifications database, revealed in 2011, combines the “old” biomet-
rics, such as fingerprints, with the new, such as facial scans, reportedly covering “close
to ⅓ [of the U.S.] population” (Lynch). These records include both subjects of criminal
investigations and individuals who are not (yet) being investigated but who submitted
biometrics as part of, for example, a criminal arrest, airline accommodations (i.e., TSA
PreCheck/Global Entry), a credit check, a visa, or an application for a job driver’s license.
Excluding ­fingerprint-only records, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Tech-
nology concluded that “combining FBI data with new […] law enforcement face recogni-
tion affects over 117 million American adults” (Garvie et al.). The latter statistic amounts
to nearly half of all U.S. citizens. The Georgetown Law Center authors describe facial rec-
ognition technology as “neither new nor rare,” noting, “[it is] more common than fed-
eral ­court-ordered wiretaps […]. Face recognition, when it’s used most aggressively, can
change the nature of public spaces […]. It can change the basic freedom we have to go
about our lives without people identifying us from afar and in secret.”
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  133

The impact data collection has on public spaces will continue to change as technol-
ogy improves and further integrates into preexisting social systems. A 2010 NIJ report
concluded that camera technology combined with facial recognition could identify a tar-
get at one thousand meters (Ford). In 2019, ­gigapixel-capable cameras could produce an
image suitable for identifying an individual from miles away (Longstaff). Noted security
expert Bruce Schneier underscores the newly emboldened power of video:
Recent developments in video analytics—fueled by artificial intelligence techniques like
machine learning—enable computers to watch and understand surveillance videos with
­human-like discernment. Identification technologies make it easier to automatically figure out
who is in the videos. And finally, the cameras themselves have become cheaper, more ubiqui-
tous, and much better; cameras mounted on drones can effectively watch an entire city. Com-
puters can watch all the video without human issues like distraction, fatigue, training, or
needing to be paid [“Computers and Video Surveillance”].
This active engagement by machines, combined with ­State-managed data banks, creates
expansive possibilities for mass surveillance and automated tracking. This technology
is further supported by vast depositories of training data (i.e., pictures to teach algo-
rithm patterns), including driver’s license and passport photos, arrest records, traffic
cameras/CCTVs, and the universe of photos voluntarily uploaded to social media, many
­pre-tagged for identification by their creators. We can expect such data banks to increase
in the years to come. One area to watch is the increased use of ­video-recording doorbells
on citizens’ homes. These systems record and archive video, often integrating with neigh-
borhood and ­crime-centric platforms to share video with neighbors and police. Some
police departments are even partnering with video doorbell producers such as Amazon
to offer devices to the community free of charge, in effect increasing the area covered by
available video surveillance (Matsakis).
While facial recognition is a key technology for identifying individuals, if targets are
already known, their location can be tracked even more aggressively. The tracking of a
vehicle’s physical location has been made easier with advances such as license plate read-
ers and highway toll collection systems. These technologies have already been used by
law enforcement (Curran). For example, in 2011, Kapsch TrafficComn agreed to manu-
facture ­E-Z Pass transponders, filling a patent to add cameras to the devices (Polt et al.).
While the exploitation of license transponders voluntarily affixed to vehicles represents
an obvious form of surveillance, police have been able to ­reverse-engineer suspects’ loca-
tions with the help of companies such as Google that can locate an application in use or a
device’s GPS or ­Wi-Fi (Mak). When a device is tracked in this manner, the company can
not only determine its location but also access ­application-specific information such as
browsing history and online activity.
In addition to those surveillance techniques, law enforcement can now rely on per-
sonal devices, such as ­GPS-enabled cell phones, which individuals carry voluntarily.
­Cell-site simulators, known as Stingrays, utilize phone networks to track individuals and
have been widely reported (EFF; ACLU). Cell spoofing in this manner has been used
since at least 1995 (Shimomura) and was developed with the assistance of the Central
Intelligence Agency (Barrett, “CIA Aided Program to Spy on U.S. Cellphones”). Sting-
rays can set a target location and collect massive data from all of the phones in a given
area. Depending on the model, Stingrays can collect ­device-identifying information (i.e.,
IMSI number) and call metadata (e.g., number, duration) as well as various components
of voice calls, text messages, and data usage (e.g., websites visited) (EFF). This technology
134   The Body in Theory

can track a specific individual or collect information broadly from up to ten thousand
cellular accounts in a targeted area (Scahill and Williams).
These technologies of surveillance can serve as a means for the repression of politi-
cal dissenters, fostering a compliant citizenry through constant observation and increas-
ing awareness of that omnipresence. For example, in 2003 the ­M iami-Dade police
purchased and deployed a Stingray to monitor leftist protests attempting to disrupt a
trade summit (­M iami-Dade Police Department), and ­r acial-justice organizers have
widely speculated about the police’s use of Stingray devices (CBS 2 Chicago; Eördögh).
While a complete accounting of their use in targeting social movements alone is diffi-
cult to determine, a study of Baltimore’s police found Stingrays were used “4,300 times”
between 2007 and 2015 (Fenton). This technology has an even more expansive reach
when used as ­so-called “dirtboxes”—Stingray devices affixed to a small, ­fixed-wing air-
craft, which is flown over an area. In 2016, it was revealed through an FOIA lawsuit that
dirtboxes were being used by the United States Marshalls Service and “perhaps other
agencies” (Crocker). The Marshalls have been conducting searches since “around 2007”
using Cessna aircraft from five metropolitan airports and with a “flying range covering
most of the U.S. population” (Barrett, “Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy
Program”). The FBI states that its “first successful airborne geolocation mission involving
cellular technology” (qtd. in Crocker) was not until 2009, although even with this caveat,
the federal government is now able to aerially sweep up troves of data and forward it
onward.
These data fragments are mainlined into a variety of geosurveillance platforms such
as the DHS’s Future Attribute Screen Technology, a platform that “employs an array of
biometric technologies in order to […] flag individuals” (Swanlund and Schuurman 921).
While aggregated location and cellular data represent invasive and telling pieces of intel-
ligence, they are but two examples of data swept up in regimes of surveillance. Other
mechanisms, such as police recording and analyzing audio from public spaces (Ward)
or the National Security Agency directly interjecting its observers into the networks of
Google and Yahoo (Ehrenfreund), speak to the inescapability of this regime, the unbri-
dled ­non-limits of its reach and scope.
These technologies refine, revise, and enhance the ­eighteenth-century disciplinary
model described by Foucault, ensuring that citizens are constantly under a surveillance
of which they are aware. With our voices, bodies, faces, and “likes” observed and pre-
served for analysis and archiving, citizens are inculcated within a disciplinary regime
that is totalizing. The disciplinary, omnipresent effects of acknowledged electronic sur-
veillance rely upon the surveilled person’s prior recollections of State brutality. Foucault
discusses this point in relation to the panopticon, envisioned in Jeremy Bentham’s famed
prison. Conceptually, the panopticon is a “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresence” (Disci-
pline and Punish 214) of disciplinary power, which develops from the ­pre-modern coer-
cive spectacle of guillotines, crucifixions, the stocks, lynching,5 and other forms of State
violence—a spectacle post–Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call
the “communication of fear” (323). Such violent rituals—whether ­extra-judicial assassi-
nation of “terrorists” or police brutality—demonstrate sovereign power’s ability to keep
disciplinary memory alive, fresh in mind. These periods that involve the reemergence of
the monarch—where power is “most graphically expressed” (Stewart 18)—are costly for
the regime, as it may lose legitimacy through its unabashed display of barbarity, and thus
such periods are intervallic and not sustained indefinitely.
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  135

Conclusion
Collectively, the aforementioned technologies serve to create a web of intersecting
data—physical location, online activity, physical attributes. Some of these elements such
as the highlights of our social lives, the makeup of our kinship networks, and our pur-
chasing and media preferences are knowingly offered by individuals. While individu-
ally these details are voyeuristically intriguing, accumulated they create a signature not
easily cast aside. Viewing this biopolitical management as a negative, we can heed Fou-
cault’s call to examine these apparatuses and their productive capacity. As he argues, we
must “[show] how actual relations of subjugation manufacture subjects […] [and] reveal
relations of domination […] showing how the various operators of domination support
one another, relate to one another, at how they converge and reinforce one another in
some cases, and negate or strive to annul one another in other cases” (“Society Must Be
Defended” 45). Foucault goes on to argue that rather than seeking to understand these
mechanisms’ origins and their “relations of domination,” we should seek to “identify the
technical instruments that guarantee that they function” (46) and understand how these
technologies foster biopower and docile bodies while installing an omnipresent gaze. By
understanding and demonstrating how relationships of domination are produced and
managed within a ­technological-disciplinary society, we can better understand resistant
strategies and opportunities to challenge subjugation.
Within these regimes of control, power is not derived from a single source and is often
wielded by the State sovereign. The routinization of biopolitical power is obscured by cor-
porations who provide “free” solutions to modern (non)problems. For example, Google
operates 1.5 billion Gmail accounts (or Facebook’s 2.23 billion), openly mining records to
monetize data. Our decision to continue utilizing such platforms demonstrates an ironic
collusion: our willingness to populate the dossiers that one day will represent real economic
currency for States, corporations, and anyone from jealous friends to jilted lovers. This meta-
data is a necessary input for a disciplinary output, which Mbembe describes in terms of a
war between the State and its citizenry. As Mbembe writes, “The conduct of this type of war
depends on the creation of tight, panoptic systems that enable increasing control of individ-
uals, preferably from a distance, via the traces they leave behind” (Critique of Black Reason
23). This integration of the individual into the modern economy, discourses, bureaucracies,
and institutions allows for the free market of likes, ­re-Tweets, and ­ever-expanding circles of
“friends” and the free trading of metadata between State and capital.
While adoption of the technologies in question—for example, cell phones and social
media—may appear consensual, to not use them often creates real challenges for secur-
ing employment, accessing essential services, or staying connected to friends, family, and
interest groups. The necessity of using these technologies calls into question the consen-
sual nature of technological adoption. Certainly, one can choose to not own a cellphone,
choose to not utilize social media, and choose to remain indoors in a ­camera-less cave
shrouded in a veil that blocks the eye of facial recognition devices, but is such a choice
truly possible or desirable? How can we retain control over how our likeness and data are
observed, recorded, archived, parsed, and analyzed? In a practical sense, no one reads
Terms of Service—91 to 97 percent do not read them, according to a 2017 study (Deloitte
12)—and most people utilize some form of social media—approximately 72 percent of
American adults, according to a 2019 survey (Pew Research Center). If these trends per-
sist, and an increasing number of people routinely interact with systems designed to track
136   The Body in Theory

and monetize their lives, what implications does this have for new forms of ­un-freedom
embedded and actualized in our sites of leisure, friendship, and outward expression and
in the chronicling of our lives?
The freedom “to Instagram” and “like” is inherently entangled with the repressive
effects of our biopolitical mapping. With the physicality of the body broken into discrete
data points—phones and watches tracking steps, ­GPS-enabled devices tracking loca-
tion, social media tracking connections and preferences—a permanent and exhaustive
record of human activity is created and archived for aggregation and analysis. In order
for humans to interact with society and enjoy its benefits, we are expected to participate
in the production of our own dossiers and consent to be surveilled, marketed to, mea-
sured, and evaluated. Integration into this matrix of surveillance is presented as some-
thing an individual can opt into or out of, although this notion of choice is largely an
illusion as to “opt out” has ­far-reaching consequences that often appear as barriers. The
ritualized need for individuals to update their Facebook, Tweet a photo, and use their
GPS or even appear in online media constantly ­re-engages the body and asserts the pan-
opticonal omnipresence of a docile, disciplinary society.
For Foucault, the mechanisms of power arise in the contemporary movements along-
side the freedoms with which they are enmeshed (Birth of Biopolitics 67). For example,
we can observe the rise of SNA ­co-occurring with the deterritorialization of online social
media. Forms of resistance arise and coalesce alongside the barriers to freedom that for-
mulated their genesis. Just as the rise of the automobile was a necessary precondition for
the approximately 37,000 annual car fatalities occurring in the United States, the emer-
gence and the expansion of our digital lives have brought with them mass surveillance and
a host of negative effects we are still discovering. From the creation of intentionally false
online personas (i.e., sock puppets) to the disciplined separation of home and work lives
(i.e., siloing), awareness of the need to protect oneself from corporations and States may
be on the rise and lead to new venues of struggle, new sites of dissent, and new regimes
to subvert. As new ways to surveil produce new opportunities to subvert, and new means
to repress generate new chances to rebel, governments and corporations will continue to
compete with ­citizen-users to gain ground in the ­cat-and-mouse game of digital existence.

Notes
1. In this manner, demonstrative violence of the sovereign is not reserved to States, as ­non-State actors
employ spectacular displays of physical brutality to assert power hierarchies and maintain control. Consider
the videotaped confessions of Palestinian collaborators, the beheadings by the Islamic State, and the public
display of dismembered corpses by Mexican gang Los Zetas.
2. Foucault returns to these “methodological precautions” in “Society Must Be Defended,” especially in
chapter two.
3. Obviously, these numbers do not translate to 7.8 billion unique individuals as the figures do not account
for single users on multiple platforms.
4. The image, originally posted September 13, 2018, at 6:26 PM EST by @MassStatePolice, was quickly
taken down but was widely shared online.
5. Here we are reminded of Foucault’s narration of the drawing and quartering of the regicide Damiens in
1757 Paris in the early pages of Discipline and Punish and Mbembe’s many horrific depictions of painful dom-
ination of African bodies throughout On the Postcolony.

Works Cited
ACLU. “Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?” American Civil Liberties Union, Nov. 2018, www.aclu.
org/issues/­privacy-technology/­surveillance-technologies/­stingray-tracking-devices-whos-got-them.
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  137

Ahmed, Nafeez. “How Fracking Companies Use Facebook Surveillance to Ban Protest.” Vice, 9 July 2018, www.
vice.com/en_us/article/vbj4qb/­how-fracking-companies-use-facebook-surveillance-to-ban-protest.
Associated Press. “DNA from Cigarette Leads to Dakota Access Arrest 3 Years On.” AP NEWS, 6 Sept. 2019,
apnews.com/abb444c2e6f14ca49a675e82d4b0d520.
Ball, Leslie. “Automating Social Network Analysis: A Power Tool for ­Counter-Terrorism.” Security Journal,
vol. 29, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 147–68.
Barrett, Devlin. “Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program.” Wall Street Journal, 13
Nov. 2014. www.wsj.com, www.wsj.com/articles/­a mericans-cellphones-targeted-in-secret-u-s-spy-
program-1415917533.
_____. “CIA Aided Program to Spy on U.S. Cellphones.” Wall Street Journal, 10 Mar. 2015, www.wsj.com/
articles/­cia-gave-justice-department-secret-phone-scanning-technology-1426009924.
Betancourt, Sarah. “Massachusetts Police Tweet Lets Slip Scale of Leftwing Surveillance.” The Guard-
ian, 15 Sept. 2018, www.theguardian.com/­u s-news/2018/sep/15/­m assachusetts-police-tweet-leftwing-
surveillance-boston.
Brown, Alleen, et al. “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to ‘Defeat
Pipeline Insurgencies.’” The Intercept, 27 May 2017, theintercept.com/2017/05/27/­leaked-documents-reveal-
security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.
Cagle, Matt. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target
Activists of Color. ACLU of Northern CA, 11 Oct. 2016, www.aclunc.org/blog/­facebook-instagram-and-twitter-
provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target.
CBS 2 Chicago. “Activists Say Chicago Police Used ‘Stingray’ Eavesdropping Technology During Protests.”
CBS 2 Chicago, 6 Dec. 2014, chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/12/06/­activists-say-chicago-police-used-stingray-
eavesdropping-technology-during-protests/.
Clark, Robert M., editor. Intelligence Analysis: A ­Target-Centric Approach. 5th edition, CQ Press, 2016.
Conarck, Ben. “Monitoring Dissent: How the Jacksonville Sheriff ’s Office Spied on Protesters.” The Florida
­Times-Union, 17 Mar. 2017, www.jacksonville.com/news/florida/­public-safety/2017–​03–​17/­monitoring-
dissent-how-jacksonville-sheriff-s-office-spied.
Crocker, Andrew. New FOIA Documents Confirm FBI Used Dirtboxes on Planes Without Any Policies or
Legal Guidance. Electronic Frontier Foundation, 9 Mar. 2016, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/­new-foia-
documents-confirm-fbi-used-dirtboxes-planes-without-any-policies-or-legal.
Curran, Kathy. “Police Track Fast Lane Transponders to Catch Serial ATM Robbery Suspects.” WBZ 4/CBS
Boston, 26 May 2011, boston.cbslocal.com/2011/05/26/­police-track-fast-lane-transponders-to-catch-serial-
atm-robbery-suspects/.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Deloitte. 2017 Global Mobile Consumer Survey: U.S. Edition: The Dawn of the Next Era in Mobile. Deloitte, 2017,
p. 15, www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/­technology-media-telecommunications/­
us-tmt-2017-global-mobile-consumer-survey-executive-summary.pdf.
EFF. “­C ell-Site Simulators/IMSI Catchers.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 28 Aug. 2017, www.eff.org/
pages/­cell-site-simulatorsimsi-catchers.
Ehrenfreund, Max. “NSA Apparently Taps Google, Yahoo Networks Without Companies’ Knowledge.” Wash-
ington Post, 31 Oct. 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/­national-security/­nsa-apparently-taps-
google-yahoo-networks-without-companies-knowledge/2013/10/30/f14749d0– ​ 4 195– ​ 1 1e3-a751-
f032898f2dbc_story.html.
Eördögh, Fruzsina. “Evidence of ‘Stingray’ Phone Surveillance by Police Mounts in Chicago.” Christian Sci-
ence Monitor, Dec. 2014, www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2014/1222/­Evidence-of-stingray-phone-
surveillance-by-police-mounts-in-Chicago.
Federman, Adam. “The Private Intelligence Firm Keeping Tabs on Environmentalists.” Mother Jones, Sept.
2018, www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/09/­welund-private-intelligence-oil-gas/.
Fenton, Justin. “Baltimore Police Used Secret Technology to Track Cellphones in Thousands of Cases.” The
Baltimore Sun, 9 Apr. 2015, www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/­baltimore-city/­bs-md-ci-stingray-case-
20150408-story.html.
Ford, William A. “State of Research, Development and Evaluation at NIJ.” NIJ Biometrics Research Program
and Advances, Information and Sensor Technologies Division, National Institute of Justice, 2010, web.
archive.org/web/20100612193455/http://www.biometrics.org/bc2010/.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979.
_____. “Body/Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin
Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon et al., Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 55–62.
_____. Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books, 1977.
_____. “Govermentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell et al.,
University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 87–104.
_____. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, vol. 1, Vintage, 1990.
138   The Body in Theory

_____. Security, Territory, Population. Edited by Michel Senellart et al., translated by Graham Burchell, Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2007. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978.
_____.“Society Must Be Defended.” Translated by David Macey, Picador, 2003. Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1975–1976.
Garvie, Clare, et al. The Perpetual ­Line-Up. Georgetown Law: Center on Privacy and Technology, 2016, https://
www.perpetuallineup.org/.
Greenwald, Glenn, et al. “­Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Dis-
credit ‘Radicalizers.’” The Huffington Post, 6 Dec. 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/­nsa-
porn-muslims_n_4346128.html.
Harcourt, Bernard E. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hill, Kashmir. “The Wildly Unregulated Practice of Undercover Cops Friending People on Facebook.”
The Root, Oct. 2018, https://www.theroot.com/­t he-wildly-unregulated-practice-of-undercover-cops-
frie-1828731563.
Kadushin, Charles. Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings. Oxford University Press,
2011.
Laersson, Bengt, et al. Transformations of the Swedish Welfare State: From Social Engineering to Governance?
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. www.palgrave.com, https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230293410.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Survey of Law Enforcement Personnel and Their Use of Social Media. Nov. 2014, p. 9.
LexisNexis, www.lexisnexis.com/investigations.
Lilja, Mona, and Stellan Vinthagen. “Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Power and Biopower: Resisting What
Power with What Resistance?” Journal of Political Power, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 107–26. Taylor and Fran-
cis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/2158379X.2014.889403.
Longstaff, Ben. “See People’s Faces from Miles Away in the 195 Gigapixel Photo of Shanghai.” Medium, 9 Jan.
2019, https://medium.com/swlh/­s ee-peoples-faces-from-miles-away-in-the-195-gigapixel-photo-of-
shanghai-2830c1f158ca.
Lua, Alfred. “21 Top Social Media Sites to Consider for Your Brand.” Buffer Marketing Library, 24 Jan. 2019,
https://buffer.com/library/­social-media-sites.
Lynch, Jennifer. “FBI Ramps Up Next Generation ID ­Roll-Out—Will You End Up in the Database?” Electronic
Frontier Foundation, 19 Oct. 2011, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/­fbi-ramps-its-next-generation-
identification-roll-out-winter-will-your-image-end.
Mak, Aaron. “How Police Departments Try to Force Google to Hand Over Data on Anyone near a Crime
Scene.” Slate Magazine, Feb. 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/­reverse-location-search-warrants-
google-police.html.
Matsakis, Louise. “Cops Are Offering Ring Doorbell Cameras in Exchange for Info.” Wired, Aug. 2019. www.
wired.com, https://www.wired.com/story/­cops-offering-ring-doorbell-cameras-for-information/.
Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke University Press Books, 2017.
_____. “Necropolitics.” Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defense of Society, edited by
Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 152–82.
Medina, Richard M. “Social Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Islamist Terrorist Network.” Security Jour-
nal; Basingstoke, vol. 27, no. 1, Feb. 2014, pp. 97–121.
­Miami-Dade Police Department. Section #5: Emergency Purchases (­E1715-PD), Wireless Tracking System,
StingRay/Amerjack. Ars Technica, Sept. 2013, https://cdn.arstechnica.net/­wp-content/uploads/2013/09/­
miami-dade.pdf.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. University of Chicago Press, 1994. www.press.uchicago.edu, https://www.
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3683962.html.
_____. “The Spectacle Today: A Response to RETORT.” Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, Sept. 2008, pp. 573–81.
read.dukeupress.edu, doi:10.1215/08992363–2008–015.
Neef, Andrew. “Police Fusion Center Tied to Fake Social Media Accounts.” UNICORN RIOT, June 2019,
https://unicornriot.ninja/2019/­police-fusion-center-tied-to-fake-social-media-accounts/.
O’Brien, Matt. “Researchers: AI Surveillance Is Expanding Worldwide.” AP NEWS, 17 Sept. 2019, https://
apnews.com/d1f77d3dd2684d7e8d7d47cbd192d8dd.
Pew Research Center. “Demographics of Social Media Users and Adoption in the United States.” Pew Research
Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/­fact-sheet/­social-media/.
Polt, Michael, et al. Patent for Onboard Unit for a Road Toll System. Patentdocs, http://www.patent
sencyclopedia.com/app/20110161140#ixzz1agLrrCVD. Accessed 24 June 2019.
Prell, Christina. Social Network Analysis: History, Theory and Methodology. SAGE Publications, 2011.
Renaud, Molly, et al. “Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the
2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Recent Developments in Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Informa-
tion, Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp. 267–78.
Ruppenthal, Alex. “Records: CPD Used ­CIA-Backed Software to Monitor Social Media Accounts.” WTTW
News, 28 Feb. 2019, https://news.wttw.com/2019/02/28/­r ecords-cpd-used-cia-backed-software-
monitor-social-media-accounts.
 Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control (Loadenthal)  139

Scahill, Jeremy, and Margot Williams. “Stingrays: A Secret Catalogue of Government Gear for Spying on Your Cell-
phone.” The Intercept, 17 Dec. 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/­a-secret-catalogue-of-government-
gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/.
Schepis, Daniel. Social Network Analysis from a Qualitative Perspective. Research Gate, 2011, https://www.
researchgate.net/publication/311614546_Social_Network_Analysis_from_a_Qualitative_Perspective.
Schneier, Bruce. “Computers and Video Surveillance.” Schneier on Security, June 2019, https://www.schneier.
com/blog/archives/2019/06/computers_and_video.html.
_____. “Surveillance Kills Freedom by Killing Experimentation.” Wired, Nov. 2018. www.wired.com, https://
www.wired.com/story/­mcsweeneys-excerpt-the-right-to-experiment/.
Shimomura, Tsutomu. “Catching Kevin.” Wired, Feb. 1996. www.wired.com, https://www.wired.com/1996/02/
catching/.
Staples, William G. The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States. Palgrave
Macmillan, 1997.
Stewart, Angus. Theories of Power and Domination: The Politics of Empowerment in Late Modernity. SAGE
Publications, 2001.
Swanlund, David, and Nadine Schuurman. “Second Generation Biometrics and the Future of Geosurveillance:
A Minority Report on FAST.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2018,
pp. 920–38.
Thalen, Michael. “Leaked Email Exposes Bank of America’s Social Media Spies.” PopularResistance.Org, Jan.
2014, https://popularresistance.org/­leaked-email-exposes-bank-of-americas-social-media-spies/.
United States Joint Forces Command. Commander’s Handbook for Attack the Network. 1.0, Joint Warfighting
Center, Joint Doctrine Support Division, 2011, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/jwfc/atn_hbk.pdf.
Ward, Jackie. “Hidden Microphones Exposed as Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area.”
KPIX 5 CBS SF BayArea, 13 May 2016, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/13/­hidden-microphones-
exposed-as-part-of-government-surveillance-program-in-the-bay-area/.
 From Symptom to Sinthôme
Ridding the “Body of Substance”
in My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Erica D. Galioto

The unnamed protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and
Relaxation, refuses to maintain her body in the summer of 2000 and decides to sleep as
much as she can for a full year with the assistance of narcotics prescribed by an oblivious
psychiatrist. On the cusp of 9/11 in New York City, My Year of Rest and Relaxation osten-
sibly reveals the causes of the young protagonist’s drive to avoid her life in sleep: a perpet-
ual feeling of deadness exacerbated by her parents’ deaths, consumerist superficiality, and
unhealthy relationships. However, when viewed through the lens of a Lacanian approach
to the body, it can be argued that the novel marks a sophisticated trajectory from symp-
tom to sinthôme, as elaborated by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XXIII: The Sinthôme.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation can be broken into three main sections that offer
reflection on the narrator’s psychic state. In the first section, the narrator is stuck repeat-
ing symptomatic behavior. Although it has been five years since her parents’ deaths, “first
[her] dad from cancer, then [her] mother from pills and alcohol six weeks later” (Mosh-
fegh 49), her ­present-day symptoms indicate that she has not yet worked through these
losses and that she has instead become consumed with avoiding the pain that confronting
their deaths would cause. In the second section, the narrator attempts to cure her uncom-
fortable symptoms through concerted sleep: a method she believes will end the repeti-
tious imprisonment of her mind and body. While she attempts to “save [her] life” during
this phase, the narrator actually continues to engage in her symptomatic behavior until
the death of her only friend’s mother pushes her to commit to a more comprehensive
sleep treatment (7). In the third section, the narrator dedicates herself to an even more
extreme plan for sleep that puts her almost completely out of consciousness for 120 days.
Eventually, this phase concludes with the awakening she wants. Moshfegh’s quirky novel
remarkably illustrates that the treatment works, for the narrator’s ­self-induced excessive
sleep ultimately rescripts her relationship to reality. Her movement from the avoidance of
pain through repetitious behaviors to a prolonged and uninterrupted sleep that results in
meaningful rebirth follows the same path as the transition from symptom to sinthôme in
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan describes the sinthôme as an “event of the body,” and so
it is fitting that our narrator transforms her body as she pursues rebirth (Seminar XXIII
185).

140
 From Symptom to Sinthôme (Galioto)  141

I
Set in the early months of the new century, My Year of Rest and Relaxation chroni-
cles the transformative year of a ­twenty-two-year-old unnamed antiheroine as she rejects
her enviable life for the productive inactivity of sleep. Until both of her parents die in
quick succession during her junior year at Columbia, the narrator’s childhood was one
of parental distance and unmet emotional needs. Reared without the role modeling of
healthy emotional management and currently resistant to the painful mourning process
of ­working-through, she has become depressed. Although she has an Ivy League ped-
igree, an inherited trust fund, and the superficial trappings reflective of the excesses of
the year 2000, our narrator enjoys no pleasure. Her art gallery job is meaningless and
unnecessary, like the ironic installations of counterculture revered by the vapid Man-
hattan patrons, and her coiffed feminine appearance barely conceals the unacknowl-
edged sadness beneath the surface. To put it bluntly, she hates her life, and she hates the
façade of “pretending to live a life” (4). Her refusal to confront loss has anchored her to
an unhappy, superficial place where she feels trapped by painful symptoms and often
escapes thoughtful engagement with herself and others through endlessly looping mov-
ies on VHS.
The narrator has only two significant relationships, and both highlight her symp-
tomatic repetitions and their inextricable linkage of mind and body: Trevor, her
­on-again/­off-again boyfriend, and Reva, her best friend. Her relationships with both
individuals reflect her pain and its manifestation in the body. While Trevor period-
ically resurfaces to use the narrator’s body for his sexual release—most disturbingly
even during her sleeping states—Reva functions as her female double, simultaneously
occasioning pity and aggression. Both young women use their bodies symptomatically
through a combination of intoxicating substances, bulimic binges and purges, and pun-
ishing sexual encounters. Although their symptoms manifest differently at times, each of
their symptoms signifies the bodily experience of being imprisoned, anchored in place
with mind and body held captive through repetitious actions. Extending the Freudian
notion of repression, Lacan maintains that the symptom reveals the unconscious through
its tether to the same cyclical return that identifies the subject through these behaviors.
The endlessly masochistic ­self-harming symptoms of the twinned narrator and Reva
illustrate this phenomenon. “We’re mostly empty space,” the narrator dully concludes,
aware of her own symptomatic repetition consistently encircling a lack that will never be
filled, and thus satisfied, with possessions, sex, or food (5).
Eventually, she reaches a point in the first section of the novel where she acknowl-
edges her unchanging psychic state and wishes to rid herself of her symptom, a complex
web of interconnected symptoms. She states, “I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish
to escape the prison of mind and body” (18). The narrator’s constant feeling of emptiness
combined with her refusal to participate in the simulacrum of living, then, sends her into
chemical hibernation, where she opts out of the sleepwalking of daily life to indulge in
literal sleep as a more authentic representation of her flattened state. “Sometimes I feel
dead,” she admits to Dr. Tuttle, the quack psychiatrist who prescribes a litany of real and
imagined psychopharmaceuticals (19). Our narrator claims she is not suicidal and thus
not actively seeking literal death; however, she is courting a death of sorts, and that is
the symbolic death of her ongoing symptom, which she will ultimately replace with the
writing of her sinthôme, a ­self-initiated creative solution that stops ongoing symptomatic
142   The Body in Theory

behaviors and replaces them with a new linkage of mind and body. She then actively
enlists the unwitting Dr. Tuttle on her therapeutic quest for disintegration and rebirth
through the only treatment she believes will work: sleep. After fabricating the insom-
nia she knows will result in prescriptions for sleep aids, the narrator thinks, “I would risk
death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person” (26).
Her proposed sleeping cure must then be read as an attempt to break out of her
repeated symptoms into a new landscape, and she seeks release that first occurs at the
level of the body. For example, even when she is awake, the narrator is not fully present
as an embodied subject because of her omnipresent drowsiness, and her extreme torpor
clearly renders her oblivious to her emotions, relationships, and desires. When she is in
states of wakefulness, the narrator feels that her body is other to her. Once she acknowl-
edges this sense of alienation, she no longer wants to force her female body to conform
to the ideal perpetuated in society. The narrator rightly ascertains that her first step to
breaking the chains of her imprisonment is to abandon the careful maintenance of her
body’s feminine appearance: “I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing,
stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfo-
liating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently,” she admits (2). Although paradoxi-
cally she still looks beautiful to others, this early refusal to adhere to the script of required
feminine bodily upkeep is the narrator’s first step to the new signification she wants to
initiate after distancing herself from her symptomatic behaviors. Rejecting her own com-
pliance to the hegemonic discourse speaking through her body, the narrator loosens the
expectation of uncomfortable performativity and actively disengages from her body to
untwine the tangle of psyche, materiality, and otherness housed there. Her decision to
increase her sleeping hours, combined with her adamant abolishment of ­self-care, works
in tandem with her body’s unraveling.
The narrator’s impulse to escape the body’s imprisonment through extensive sleep
and the refusal of bodily maintenance resonates with the Lacanian conception of the
body and its relationship to signification and the painful pleasure of jouissance, for in
psychoanalysis the body is discursive. In other words, inscribed in the symbolic order
is what Lacan calls the big Other, the radical alterity equated with discourse and the law
that can never be assimilated but still overwrites the body through its contribution to
the unconscious and language. As we see with society at large and the narrator’s main
social companions, the big Other and its representative “little others” mark her body,
illustrating how the body becomes “substance” and even “enjoying substance,” used by
and for the Other, as articulated by Lacan in Seminar XX (23). The narrator’s body is first
manipulated as a pliable substance by the Other, molding her in accordance with the
constellation of her unique family structure as well as with the expectations of accept-
able femininity at the turn of the new millennium. Eventually, the narrator marks the
substance of her own body through her symptomatic behaviors and relationships. “Over
the next five years,” she explains, “Trevor would periodically deplete his ­self-esteem in
relationships with older women, i.e., women his age, then return to me to reboot. I was
always available” (31). As seen here, the narrator’s body signifies her subjectivity in her
willingness to be used by Trevor, despite his poor treatment of her.
Stemming from the Other but eventually carried out by the subject, these manip-
ulations of the body reflect the narrator’s unique form of extimacy, the psychoanalytic
notion that the internal is penetrated by external representatives of the Other that pro-
duce symptomatic jouissance. Since the body is the site of pleasure as well, the substance
 From Symptom to Sinthôme (Galioto)  143

is also said to enjoy even in unpleasant times. “‘Let me be dumb,’ she begs, glugging the
NyQuil” in front of Reva (59). Pain, pleasure, and predictable repetition are endlessly
experienced in a hollow loop through the body as a container tangent to external others.
Our narrator’s symptom is the substance of her body, and so it is the body she wants to
rid herself of. Her previously coiffed female body cycled through the same route of pain
and emptiness is a signifier she wants to change. For her body to become a new signifier,
she must loosen and eliminate the ongoing substance of this body, eventually resignify-
ing it with new meaning that she herself initiates—the very definition of the sinthôme.
While she actively abandons the demands of the Other to feminize her body in the
first phase of her transformation, our narrator continues to enact her symptom through
it. Alcohol abuse, disordered eating, and sexual passivity remain central features in the
narrator’s waking life, and her body remains consistent in its signifying message to the
Other. Despite Reva’s similar symptomatic expressions, even she can see that her best
friend is “just avoiding [her] problems” (58). These ­self-harming symptoms show how
the body uses physical enactments as its own language, demanding the narrativization
of pain that has been repressed. In other words, the physical manifestations of these psy-
chic symptoms present messages to the Other in their request for attention, care, and
response, and the body becomes a substance to be read and hopefully rearticulated. Psy-
choanalysis theorizes that these repetitive behaviors and relationships are idiosyncratic
to each subject and that they demand a ­working-through first initiated through linguis-
tic acknowledgment. Trevor and Reva, however, are also trapped in their repetitive symp-
toms and cannot offer the narrator language that they too fail to possess.
Symbolizing the blind sleepwalking of both the United States on the brink of
national trauma as well as the ­sad-girl avoidance of emotional confrontation, Moshfegh’s
narrator wants to avoid her life in sleep and thus prolong a reality free from emotion;
however, as she is constantly reminded during her wakened states, avoiding the present
does not erase it. Upon waking, she laments, “I will always still be me” (40). The “me” that
always awakens reveals a consciousness held captive through her embodied subjectivity
and repetition of symptoms. For our narrator to change her life, stop her symptoms, and
become a different signifier, she must separate from her locus, which is her physical body,
and enter “utter signifying ambiguity” (Lacan, Seminar XX 23). The goal of her extended
sleep is to create space for her to take charge of herself as symptom and initiate a new sig-
nifying chain through her body as sinthôme instead.

II
Upon request, Dr. Tuttle constantly scribbles new ­sleep-inducing psychopharma-
ceuticals on her pad, and so the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation slips into a
“stranger, less certain reality” (84). The conclusion of the first stage of the narrator’s sleep
treatment reflects her decision, as Lacan says of James Joyce in Seminar XX, to “[stuff] the
signified” (37). Because her body is the signifier that announces her ongoing psychic pain
through her symptomatic behaviors and relationships, as well as the beautiful representa-
tion of the feminine ideal, she must distance herself from her body in order to “stuff ” the
pain and beauty that her body signifies. Lacan alludes to Joyce’s similar disembodiment
and indeed describes Joyce’s own transition from symptom to sinthôme in Seminar XXIII.
While it needs to be emphasized that Joyce was a living author and Moshfegh’s narrator
144   The Body in Theory

a fictional construction, the concept of sinthôme and its transformative qualities can be
usefully applied to both.
Holding Joyce up as the pinnacle of psychic functioning, Lacan explores the mod-
ernist author’s transformation throughout this late seminar. Tracing Joyce’s trajectory,
Lacan illustrates how in Ulysses Joyce solves his symptom by “stuffing” his previous sig-
nifications and knotting himself in his sinthôme instead, and this journey is similar to
the one followed by Moshfegh’s narrator. Her symptom hearkens back to the unmourned
loss of her parents, which is symbolized in the childhood house she still holds as a mon-
ument to her sadness. She explains, “I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emp-
tiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be
stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t” (64). Like her symp-
tom, Joyce’s symptom can also be traced back to his early childhood dynamic, particu-
larly to his problematic relation with his father and his father’s inability to represent the
law for his family. But in writing Ulysses, Joyce is able to stop his repetitive and symptom-
atic behavior when he authors a new creative language structure dominated by allusion,
word play, and multiple associative meanings. This creation is the sinthôme: the estab-
lishment of new signifiers and new associations that branch in new directions away from
the deadlock of the previous symptom and its intransigence. The narrator’s pain in My
Year of Rest and Relaxation and Joyce’s paternal failure are both symptoms whose signify-
ing features become unbearable to each subject, and so both actively seek a firm separa-
tion from those symptoms and a creative outlet to initiate a new signifying chain. In the
case of Moshfegh’s narrator, for example, she reaches a point where she longs for the sleep
that would overthrow her symptom and make her “safe from the miseries of [her] wak-
ing consciousness” (46).
Lacan uses Joyce as a role model for the process of solving his symptom, otherwise
known as deciphering his riddle, when Joyce “cancelled his subscription to the uncon-
scious” and the symptom was surpassed for the sinthôme (Seminar XXIII 146). When
he—and our narrator—halt their symptomatic behaviors, they are, in effect, stopping
their blind adherence to the unconscious. Instead of existing as a body that signified lin-
guistically due to unconscious forces outside of conscious control, Joyce seeks a direct
relationship to language when he suffocates the signified, thereby devaluing it with signi-
fiers that, in Finnegans Wake, for example, “can be read in an infinite number of different
ways” (Lacan, Seminar XX 37). Using her body rather than the blank page as her linguis-
tic canvas, the unnamed narrator adopts a similar methodology. She, like Joyce, suspends
the symbolic fictions that had been dominating her existence and her relationship to her
body. It is through this important forsaking of the symbolic that the unconscious might
be “cancelled” or at the very least redirected. Although it might appear contradictory,
rejecting symbolic associations weakens the often unchallenged power of the uncon-
scious because it is through the symbolic order that the unconscious exerts its pressure.
As she devalues her own symbolic associations and subtracts herself from her ongo-
ing chain, she finds herself with “no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains”
(84). Thus, she is no longer shackled to the signifying features of her symbolic universe.
The narrator continues to describe how her unraveling bears linguistic and emotional
consequences when she says, “I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much
to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less
attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some
new form. This was my hope. This was the dream” (84). Since language and the body are
 From Symptom to Sinthôme (Galioto)  145

mutually reinforcing, the dissolution of one occasions the dissolution of the other. In
essence, when she loses her consciousness in sleep, she also loses the body that contains
it. As she begins her transition from symptom to sinthôme, the narrator is awake only for
a few hours a day, and her body begins to disappear: she gets thinner, loses muscle mass,
and absents herself from life. During this transitional period, her body becomes purely
functional as opposed to relational or ornamental as she acknowledges the illusory unity
of her prior existence and its reliance on interminable body maintenance.
Despite her efforts to unbind herself from her symptom, the narrator of My Year of
Rest and Relaxation has not yet passed into the sinthôme and its creative solution to her
ongoing misery. Two important events transpire during this ­in-between phase when she
is attempting to rescript her body but does not yet own it as “[Joyce] owns it” (Lacan,
Seminar XXIII 133). The first is the narrator’s ongoing symptomatic behavior during
sleep, and the second is the death of Reva’s mother. During this section of the novel, the
narrator exists in the space between two deaths. She has endured the symbolic suicide of
removing herself from her ongoing network of signification by separating herself from
her previous life and attempting to sleep deliberately for long stretches of time, but she
has not yet constructed a sinthôme or chosen the second death of suicide. The repetition
of her symptom even in this state, along with the continuation of her relationship with
Reva, places her squarely in the realm between two deaths—one symbolic and the other
literal—where it is unclear which outcome will ensue.
Losing her physical and psychic contours highlights an important transition,
although she still enacts her symptoms during her blackout phases, a consistency that
persists despite her efforts at resignification. As she recalls, “The carefree tranquility of
sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was uncon-
scious” (85). While these behaviors—furniture rearrangement, trips to the bodega, and
cigarette smoking—are initially mundane, they increasingly resemble her ­self-harming
waking symptoms. Calling them “medicated blackouts,” she eventually acknowledges
that these sleepwalking hours reveal her “lusts”: binge eating, online shopping, and sex-
ual aggressiveness (87). Her intermittent sleep schedule, while more intensively obliter-
ating than healthy restorative sleep, is not yet annihilating the symptoms keeping her in
place. Even in excessive sleep, the force of her symptoms provides an unyielding consis-
tency to her behaviors. Like the dreams that also arise for her during this time and pass
messages from the unconscious to the conscious states of mind during sleep, the narra-
tor’s ego has relaxed, but her unconscious continues to push its symptomatic repetitions.
Not surprisingly, when she glimpses her reflection in a storefront window, she still has a
body sending messages to the Other despite her attempts to silence it, and a pleasing one
at that: “It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still
had good posture” (92–93). She continues to inhabit her body during her waking state to
the extent that it serves its signifying function.
When not asleep, Moshfegh’s narrator has an enviable female body and an empty
life, which continues to cause her pain. She wishes for an apartment from “a different
life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I
first saw it,” but, of course, when she unlocks her door, “nothing had changed” (105–06).
The death of Reva’s mother, specifically, punctuates the narrator’s emotional stagnation.
Despite the triggering of memories of her own mother’s death, Reva’s loss initially fails to
engage identification or catharsis: “It was the particular sadness of a young woman who
had lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But
146   The Body in Theory

I didn’t feel it inside me” (134). She still inhabits her body, and she still avoids encoun-
tering her own uncomfortable emotions. Despite her wish for a new life, inaugurated
perhaps through alternative approaches to being in the world, the narrator physically dis-
engages from Reva and actually feigns sleep rather than wakefully facing an uncomfort-
able moment when she is expected to bear witness to her friend’s pain—a pain that surely
resonates with her own.
Reva’s emotional expression, combined with her continued caretaking of her best
friend, does little to rouse the narrator out of her closed off and deadened state. Instead,
she repeatedly acknowledges her disgust with Reva, her numbed feelings, and her refusal
of grief. “I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from,” she recollects (137).
Likewise, her body becomes a “wooden sculpture in need of sanding,” not the shedding
orange peel extolled of Joyce (143). While the death of Reva’s mother appears to send
the narrator even deeper into her own solipsistic symptoms, her eventual identification
with her friend’s loss successfully shifts her subjectivity. For example, it is clear that she
is no longer blaming others for her emotions but noting herself as the source of them.
The accumulation of these realizations parallels the culling of her own memories of the
time immediately following her own mother’s death and her “poring over [her] child-
hood photo albums, sobbing over [her] mother’s unopened packages of pantyhose” and
“[her] father’s deathbed pajamas” (153). By the time Reva gives her eulogy, our narrator is
able to “[sit] there until the funeral was over, [with Reva] in the throes of despair, trem-
bling into [her] armpit” (165).
In a reverie of ­self-awareness, the narrator describes the relationship between what
was previously her overly signified body and the severance of her emotions following her
parents’ deaths: “More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages,
waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel
good” (157). She now includes her drug dealer, Dr. Tuttle, “a whore to feed me lullabies”
(157), in this list of individuals who provide temporary protection from her pain, as well
as her double, Reva, whom she loved to hate, “an idiot” (166). In fact, states the narrator,
“Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff
I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like head-
lights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely
familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again” (166). These revelations, that her life
is the same in sleep as it is in wakefulness and that her anesthetizing agents reflect her
own disgusting vacuity back to her, push her to take more drastic measures to creatively
address her unhappiness through the artistic construction of a sinthôme. At the end of
this second phase of concerted sleep, the narrator, who is so often trapped in her own
psychic space, says out loud, “‘I love you, Reva.’ […] ‘I’m really sorry about your mom’”
(177). This verbal articulation authenticates her movement away from her ongoing symp-
tom and toward her ­self-fashioned sinthôme. She is ready for deeper sleep, and in this
final stage, she aligns herself with Joyce’s passage from symptom to sinthôme.
Patricia Gherovici cogently articulates Lacan’s assessment of Joyce on his transition
to the sinthôme in the following quote: “When Lacan turned his attention to Joyce’s writ-
ings, he discovered a new paradigm and a new relation to the body. He observed that
Joyce had a peculiar body, one that could fall, slip away, like an open envelope letting go
of its contents” (152–53). She continues, stating that Lacan’s analysis of this incomplete
container leads him to assert that “in Joyce’s case, it was writing that would ‘hold’ the
body” (153). Gherovici’s explanation foregrounds the two central features of the bodily
 From Symptom to Sinthôme (Galioto)  147

sinthôme in Lacanian psychoanalysis: (1) a body that unravels itself from the subject and
(2) a creative embodiment that contains the unfixed body. The narrator’s body eventu-
ally features both, as does Joyce’s body, for through her use of the drug Infermiterol, she is
able to intensify her sleep treatment, thus placing her sleeping cure in the realm of a sin-
thômatic act rather than in the pure avoidance of a defense mechanism.

III
The narrator finally shifts from symptom to sinthôme when she embarks on a
­four-month sleep treatment through which she not only allows her body to slip away but
also employs a creative strategy to contain her unfixed body. Ironically, this sinthômatic
solution comes via the pathway of the contemporary art scene otherwise skewered
throughout My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While often held as the apex of sophisti-
cated culture and philosophy, “the art world,” our narrator soon learns, “had turned out
to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capi-
talism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine” (182–83). Subversive counterculture is
quickly appropriated and mainstreamed, and featured exhibitions are labeled a “brutal
success” or “cruelly funny” when they effectively “marked the end of the sacred in art”
(45). Our narrator initially meets acclaimed artist Ping Xi at the gallery during his first
solo show, “Bowwowwow,” which features euthanized dogs with “red lasers shot out of
their eyes,” and, as we see, the final detachment of her own body uncomfortably conjures
a similar image of taxidermized embodiment (44). Her partnership with this same art-
ist occasions the transformative shedding of her body when she sleeps almost exclusively
for four months under his wardenship. While his ironic “Body of Substance” show previ-
ously capitalized on the “nonsense” of splatter paintings made from his own ejaculate, he
now assists the narrator’s final separation from the substance of her symptom as a signi-
fying body.
Moshfegh strikingly aligns the human subject and artistic expression through the
proximity of desire and abjection, where both seem far from the sacred and present the
hideosity of vapid excess that marks the onset of the ­twenty-first century. Our narrator
succumbs to this ridiculous irreverence as it is directed on both her body and the art Ping
Xi will construct out of her submission in sleep, and yet her sinthômatic knotting resur-
rects the sacred of her body and of the art she was never brave enough to create. When
she turns herself into the raw material of artistic expression, it is worldly transcendence
she seeks to attain and not abolish. The following passage clearly delineates how her jour-
ney differs from that of the postmodern artist she enlists for help: “But the project was
beyond issues of ‘identity’ and ‘society’ and ‘institutions.’ Mine was a quest for a new
spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he understood me. But he
couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to” (264). Aimed not at the symbolic insti-
tutions of the art community, the narrator’s urge is directed at herself and her desperate
attempt to rid herself of her symptomatic rigidity for a new relationship to reality. Lacan
says that writing holds Joyce when his body slips away; for our narrator, Ping Xi and his
artwork will function as the writing that will hold her when her body slips away. She
believes her new subjectivity will come not through less sleep but through more.
The narrator will conclude her sleep cure by entering into “good strong American
sleep” through the calculated ingestion of the Infermiterol prescribed by Dr. Tuttle (252).
148   The Body in Theory

Strong enough to incapacitate her for ­three-day-long stretches, her stockpile of this drug
will permit her to slumber from January 31, 2001, to June 1, 2001, four full months of sleep
concluding on the ­one-year anniversary of her ­self-induced year of rest and relaxation.
Her partnership with Ping Xi ensures that she will be safely locked in during her cyclical
­three-day comas and that the typical fodder of her blackouts will be rendered nonexis-
tent. The “blank canvas” that she prepares for her mind and body extends to her apart-
ment dwelling as well, and she gives away her furniture, technology, and most worldly
possessions (258). She retains only the necessities she will require upon each waking such
as toiletries, vitamins, and pajamas. Every Sunday, Ping Xi plans to bring her a pizza, and
when she comes to consciousness after three days of sleep, she pledges to remain awake
for just one hour, eat some pizza, do some mild stretching, and exchange used pajamas
with a clean set.
For 120 days, she commits to living in this extreme chemical hibernation while her
warden locks her in from the outside after using her as his model during her sleeping
sessions. He promises to keep their work secret so that there will be no reminders of
his presence in her world, “no narrative that [she] could follow, no pieces for [her] to
put together” (263). Indeed, subtraction from her signifying chain is exactly what she
demands. Their agreement also includes a calendar on which he will cross off the days
and notes scribbled on ­post-its. “If, when I woke up in June,” she considers, “life still
wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made” (260).
And so she submits to being held by the hack who intends to shock the world with cata-
loguing his muse’s rejection of it. Inwardly, she bemoans his idiocy but ultimately “trusted
his resolve” (266).
As the narrator engages in the final four months of her sleep treatment and Ping Xi
works on the show he will later call “Large Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman,” she
seems to coalesce with a living death, rousing only every three days to quickly submerge
again. However, it is not an immersion into the crypt of depression that she experiences
but the detachment of the body from the ego and the chain of signification that Lacan
so lauded in Joyce. The body is the ultimate signifier, and she, like Joyce, successfully
destroys it, and this obliteration also undoes the consistency that had previously kept her
locked in place, the knot of a symptom that is the subject and repeats itself endlessly even
in sleep. As Lacan states of Joyce, one cannot drop one’s relationship to the body without
also dropping one’s relationship to the ego. He writes, “The Ego is said to be narcissistic
because, at a certain level, there is something that supports the body as an image” (Semi-
nar XXIII 129). The narrator’s abandonment of her narcissistic ego in nearly interminable
sleep occurs simultaneously with the detaching of her body, felt now as alien, separate,
and unreal to her upon each waking. She views this detachment as ­matter-of-fact, as
when she “came to with [her] thumb in [her] mouth” in an image of apparent regression
(268).
Likewise, as her body disintegrates, her ego’s capacity for linguistic metonymy, or
appropriate conceptual abstraction, dissolves as well. Each successive awakening brings
increased language play in which “each word carried with it a seemingly endless string of
associations” (269). For example, her shampoo bottle’s listing of sodium evokes the free
association of “salt, white, clouds, gauze, silt, sand, sky, lark, string, kitten, claws, wound,
iron, omega” (269). Removed from the previous chain of signification when she drops
her body and her ego from it, the narrator’s reality destabilizes. “I could feel the cer-
tainty of a reality leaching out of me like calcium from a bone,” she states (270). No longer
 From Symptom to Sinthôme (Galioto)  149

signifying the same repetitious symptom to the Other, the narrator begins to establish a
new chain through the sinthôme she is creating.
In the last month of her sleeping treatment, the narrator’s burgeoning subjectivity
emerges as she finds herself experiencing new desire: not desire trapped in the endless
loop of symptomatic pain but desire untethered to anything but the sinthômatic con-
struction entwined by her new constellation of body and psyche. As Lacan says of Joyce,
“[T]he rupture of the Ego sets the imaginary relation free” so that a new chain may take its
place (Seminar XXIII 134). First, she begins to imagine the work that Ping Xi is creating
as he contains the shifting contours of her body during its transformation. Awash with
colors but with her face obstructed, the paintings she envisions portray a creative imagi-
nation released from its previous deadened state. Second, she encounters new desires for
the sensory indulgence of food, “fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from ‘a good
Japanese restaurant,’” and flowers, “‘Lilies,’ ‘Birds of Paradise,’ ‘Daisies,’ ‘A branch of cat-
kins’” (273). These desires are accompanied by a new sense of embodiment as well: softer
contours, bones without aches, an unrigid face. Now, her “waking hours were spent gen-
tly, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance” (273). Third, she
anticipates her future and her reentry into a world she ejected herself from.
Separate from the world, and finally set free, the narrator is fluidly ­self-defined, con-
nected through a sinthôme of a body she has “written” herself. On her last descent into
sleep, the narrator admits to feeling both afraid and lonely as she realizes she is for the
first time “floating without a tether” (275). Most significantly, she finds her cheek wet
with fresh tears and hears herself “gasp” and “whimper” outside the discursivity of actual
language (276). “I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone,” she states after
taking her last swallow of Infermiterol. Needing no “reassurance or directionality,” she
awakens with the thought, “I was alive” (276). To be alive, she now understands, she must
first be gone: gone from the symptom housed in her previous body and into the sinthôme
tied to her new incarnation.
Dead to her former embodiment of symptoms, she lives in the sinthôme of her new
desires, marked not by the outside world but by her own invention. This new knot is of a
different consistency from the original symptom because it is beyond symbolic represen-
tation and closer to the real. Her reentry into the world that continued to spin without
her is marked with a presentness unexperienced before. She feels her body move through
time and space deliberately; she ingests food that includes pleasure beyond sustenance;
she feeds her awareness of lack with reading and thinking. She notices that Reva’s con-
tinued and repetitive symptoms are “troublingly pornographic” (280). She even captures
the unwritten course of her own future on a trip to the Met, where she is scolded and
asked to step back from the hung art: instead of injecting more distance between herself
and the stagnant masterpiece, she boldly steps forward first to touch the frame and then
to place her “whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to
[herself] that there was no God stalking [her] soul. Time was not immemorial. Things
were just things” (286–87). Her final articulation echoes the epiphanic mode of Joyce:
“Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was
soft and calm and felt things” (288). Selling her parents’ house and tossing the accumu-
lated objects therein sutures her sinthômatic act. She embarks on a new future that has yet
to be written and perhaps even grants herself a new name to launch her associative chain.
Her friend Reva, however, fails to rewrite her body sinthômatically and loses her
body on 9/11 instead. Our narrator claims she is gone, dead after her transfer to the Twin
150   The Body in Theory

Towers and likely one of the bodies hurtling down from the North Tower. She even iso-
lates her in one body she watches repetitively on her new VCR, now used for news cov-
erage and not mindless movies. She sees her with “one ­high-heeled shoe slipping off and
hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse
untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff ” (289). Just as Reva’s assured materiality had always
stabilized the narrator when she struggled to maintain the coherence of her own exis-
tence, this female body and its allusion to her friend and the doubled existence they
shared becomes the container for her, the externalized pain of the symptom she shed
when she fastened herself together with the sinthôme of her sleep. By identifying with this
fantasy—that this female body is, in fact, her friend finally awakened at the moment she
terrifyingly plummets to her death—the narrator ties the final bow on her sinthômatic
transformation.
Through this belief, she actively chooses to fully identify herself with a fantasy of her
choosing. In his powerful analysis of 9/11, Slavoj Žižek explains both the purpose and the
threat of this identification “with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our
immersion in daily reality” (17). Rather than submitting to a symptomatic fantasy perpet-
uated by the Other as she had been doing with her behaviors and relationships, the nar-
rator now sinthômatically erects a fantasy that can contain her new subjectivity. This new
fantasy is both more obvious to the narrator because she is the conscious builder of it and
more necessary because it protects her from her previous symptomatic behavior. When
applied to Moshfegh’s narrator, “[t]his Real Thing is a fantasmatic spectre whose pres-
ence guarantees the consistency of [her] symbolic edifice, thus enabling [her] to avoid
confronting [her] constitutive inconsistency” (32). In other words, her creative solution
to her symptom includes the externalization of her previous body in the “fantasmatic
spectre” of Reva’s body, saving her from embodying it again and permitting her to be the
architect of her new “symbolic edifice.” The narrator and Reva are thus both reborn in
this sinthômatic construction occasioned through stepping into the unknown, separately
yet together. The narrator’s year of rest and relaxation awakens her to a new reality that
she can endure now that she has rid her body of the substance of its symptom and exter-
nalized it in the death of her double.

Works Cited
Gherovici, Patricia. Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgen-
derism. Routledge, 2010.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowl-
edge. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, Norton, 1998.
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthôme. Edited by ­Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by
A. R. Price, Polity Press, 2016.
Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Penguin Random House UK, 2018.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance.” Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on
September 11 and Related Dates, Verso, 2002, pp. 5–32.
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis
and Discipline
Barney’s Drawing Restraint and Foucault
on Raymond Roussel
Irina Chkhaidze

The Drawing Restraint series, begun in 1987 and ongoing, is Matthew Barney’s
­longest-spanning ­multi-media project, usually displayed as a combination of sculptural
objects, drawings, production photographs, and single or ­multi-channel video installa-
tions and occasionally performed by the artist live. In addition to the broad range of
media that Barney employs in the twenty works from the series is a remarkable diver-
sity of organic and synthetic materials such as wax, latex, aluminum, blood (fish), sea
shells, magnesium carbonate, nylon and other thermoplastics, ­self-lubricating plastic,
prosthetic plastic, and his signature substance of petroleum jelly (see Matthew Barney
1987–2007 206–22).
A recurrent topic of the project is bodily performance with references to compet-
itive training in athletic practices such as weight lifting and climbing and to biological
processes and transformations that occur within the body as a result of training. The
Drawing Restraint series centers around the idea that there is an interrelation between
resistance physically imposed on the artist’s body, on the one hand, and the creation
of artistic form, on the other. Moreover, the physiological change the body undergoes
during repetitive exercise becomes a conceptual framework for artistic production. In
order to schematize this relationship, Barney adopts a biological model of hypertrophic
muscle development: how the muscle mass is enlarged as a result of the tearing of the
muscle tissue through repetitive strain.1 According to the artist, a precondition of creat-
ing a form is thus the overcoming of resistance—literally, by working against the bodily
restraints employed during Barney’s actions, which resemble resistance training, and
metaphorically, by addressing the resistance originating from the properties of his cho-
sen materials.
This essay examines the artistic transformation of figures and forms in the Drawing
Restraint series, a metamorphosis that often results from disciplined training and over-
coming physical resistance. I conceptualize the Drawing Restraint series against the back-
drop of Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth, a book devoted to Raymond Roussel’s
poetry and prose that is, incidentally, Foucault’s only extensive theoretical engage-
ment with literature. Drawing parallels between Foucault’s theorization of the continual

151
152   The Body in Theory

transformations in Roussel’s literary pieces, on the one hand, and the bodily metamor-
phoses in Barney’s artistic project, on the other, I link metamorphosis to discipline as
shared themes that tie together theoretical writing and visual art, bearing in mind their
different forms and media. (My interest lies in Foucault’s conceptions of metamorphosis
and doubling and their relationship to discipline as articulated in the book rather than in
Roussel’s poetry or prose itself.) Finally, I place Barney’s preoccupation with metamor-
phosis as well as Foucault’s by way of Roussel in a posthumanist framework. Both Cary
Wolfe’s writing on posthumanism as a philosophical critique of anthropocentrism and
Bruce Clarke’s work on narratives of posthuman metamorphosis support the analysis of
the posthumanist tendencies in the works discussed.

Potentiality of Bodily Restraint

Barney translates the biological model of hypertrophy into an aesthetic one by using
various obstructive tools such as straps or hockey skates to restrict his range of, or con-
trol over, movement and by adapting his studio environment to create interfering situa-
tions (constructing obtrusive ramps to move across, for example) in order to complicate
the drawing procedure. The title of the series refers to this approach. For example, in the
filmed performance Drawing Restraint 1 (1987), two inclines were built in Barney’s stu-
dio, and while he moved up the incline, an elastic strap attached to his thighs was pull-
ing him towards the floor. (See figure 2.) He drew on a piece of paper attached to the wall
with the help of a long stick while struggling against the mounting resistance (Matthew
Barney 1987–2002 10–13).2
In Drawing Restraint 2 (1988), the artist used heavier and ­harder-to-handle tools for
drawing and more difficult, steep ramps to complicate the action further. (See figure 3.)
As Barney notes, it “was a meditation on the desire to make a mark, and the discipline
imposed upon that. Finished drawings were never produced” (Matthew Barney 1987–2002
21). The employment of sports equipment continued in Drawing Restraint 3 (1988), where
the artist references the notion of hypertrophy more literally by focusing his action on lift-
ing an Olympic barbell. This piece features an unconventional use of art materials: the bar-
bell cast in petroleum wax and petroleum jelly and the calcium carbonate used for the
athlete’s hands also become part of the work. Instead of a drawing, here the documented
artistic mark was the chalk that fell on the plate where the cast was lowered. In Drawing
Restraint 6, on the other hand, Barney uses a small, slightly angled trampoline to facili-
tate making contingent marks on the ceiling, one at a time, to form a fragmented drawing.
(See figures 4 and 5.) The artist jumped up and down continuously, testing both his phys-
ical and artistic prowess by setting himself an ambitious task to draw a ­self-portrait (55).
Evidently, Barney’s own body is an important medium in his art. A number of stren-
uous athletic feats feature in Drawing Restraint 11 (2005), 12 (2005), 14 (2006), and 16
(2007), in which the artist orchestrated performative climbs in several prominent con-
temporary art galleries such as Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, and the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 3 (See figures 6 and 7 respectively.) Some of these
climbs were done repeatedly (three times for Drawing Restraint 11), and, in the case of
the performance filmed at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the laborious undertak-
ing was further complicated: while climbing all four walls of the gallery, Barney’s legs
were strapped with an elastic band to two barrels of petroleum jelly on the floor (Matthew
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  153

Figure 2. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 1, 1987. Documentation of performance. © 2019

Matthew Barney. Photograph Michael Rees (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).
154   The Body in Theory

Figure 3. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 2, 1988. Black and white video, silent. 5:01 min.
Unique. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund (both
by exchange). © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Michael Rees (courtesy Matthew Barney
Studio).

Barney: Prayer 74). The physical effort involved in such actions and the struggle against
resistance, often artificially created with the use of various props, are the focus of visual
narratives in these works, while the biological analogy to hypertrophy remains import-
ant for understanding this artistic output. The goal, of course, is always to create a mark, a
sketch, or the faintest of drawings with a pronounced ­self-referential quality: the drawing
referring to an aesthetic and a conceptual system methodically devised by Barney as well
as to the process of drawing itself.
Examples of the ­self-referential orientation of the Drawing Restraint series are the
drawings created for Drawing Restraint 11, which feature the words “Situation,” “Condi-
tion,” and “Production” (Matthew Barney: Prayer 69). These terms refer to Barney’s tri-
partite system, titled The Path, created for the series. This ­three-phase diagram, or cycle,
illustrates how, according to the artist, energy is accumulated and released within the
body and is closely linked to the hypertrophic development discussed earlier. It also
addresses the artistic process more generally, giving the audience a coordinate for navi-
gating this ­non-linear project. Barney explains thus:

Opposite: Figure 4. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 6, 2004. Black and white video, silent.
6:21 min. Unique. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller
Fund (both by exchange). © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Chris Winget (courtesy Mat-
thew Barney Studio).
Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  155
156   The Body in Theory

Figure 5. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 6, 2004. Black and white video, silent. 6:21 min.
Unique. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund (both
by exchange). © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Chris Winget (courtesy Matthew Barney
Studio).
“Situation” which was diagrammed with a drawing of the reproductive system before the point
of sexual differentiation […] was a sort of useless raw energy. The “Condition” phase was kind
of a funnel, a visceral space where raw energy was made useful. The “Production” space was
an obvious anal or oral production within the metaphor of the digestive system. […] I tried to
eliminate “Production” and basically put the head inside the ass […] [“Matthew Barney: Mod-
ern Heroes” 26].

Opposite: Figure 6. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 12, 2005. Black and white video, silent.
11:50 min. Unique. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller
Fund (both by exchange). © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Hyunsoo Kim (courtesy Mat-
thew Barney Studio).
Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  157
158   The Body in Theory
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  159

According to the artist, “Situation” does not generate form but instead constitutes
undirected and undifferentiated sexual energy analogous of “an aggressive and indis-
criminate consumption,” an undisciplined energy. “Condition is the visceral funnel”
referring to a disciplined oral intake of energy encouraging growth, analogous of a stom-
ach or a womb, where undifferentiated energy starts to take form (Matthew Barney 1987–
2007 22, 24). “Production is the anal output of the Path,” represented by a dumbbell or
a hand weight that supposedly connects the mouth/“Situation” and the anus/“Produc-
tion,” generating a “loop between desire and discipline” (26). The production stage is
bypassed in order to break the linearity of this system.4 While The Path is analogous to a
digestive tract in terms of biological coordinates, in artistic terms it is set “to abstract the
form of Production” (Matthew Barney 1987–2002 88). This closed system of The Path is
­self-referential in the way that specially designated terminology is introduced to refer to
the elements of the work itself.5
Barney’s abstract terms take on a concrete shape through references to biological
functions. These ideas are meant to highlight the overall tendency of the project to pri-
oritize potentiality over actuality: in other words, it prioritizes the potential for form and
the process of making rather than finishing a completed artwork.6 This potentiality is set
into motion through the application of bodily restraint. It should be noted, however, that
regardless of Barney’s stated attempts at grappling with perpetual concerns within the
history of art and crystallizing his relationship to the vast topic of creation of form, the
unfinished and ­non-linear nature of the works from the series and their mode of presen-
tation as looping videos make them open to diverse interpretations going beyond this
carefully articulated artistic framework.

Discipline and Metamorphosis: ­Non-linear Narratives

and Materials
As discussed above, in Barney’s artistic system, the process of drawing is always
coupled with some form of physical restraint or obstacle. The transformation of a blank
paper or a designated space into an artwork is reached through athletic efforts staged by
the artist, where the idea of physical restraint is the guiding visual and conceptual prin-
ciple. The disciplining of bodily performance and of actualizations of form, of physical
and creative energies is the central concern of the series. Discipline is thus linked to the
narrative of production of an aesthetic form, on the one hand, and to the bodily transfor-
mation implied in the phenomenon of hypertrophy, on the other. In order to take shape,
form needs to overcome resistance, and the desired physical transformation is reached
through repetitive, strenuous struggle involving ­self-discipline.
Thus, in the Drawing Restraint performances and video actions (and sculptures, as
will be discussed), there is a link between discipline and bodily transformation as well
as metamorphic processes more generally: for instance, the transformation of human

Opposite: Figure 7. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 14, 2006. Color video, silent. 28:20
min. Edition of two. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker
Rockefeller Fund (both by exchange). © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Chris Winget
(courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).
160   The Body in Theory

characters into nonhuman in Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), to be analyzed later. This the-
matic connection can be fruitfully explored in relation to Death and the Labyrinth,
Foucault’s book on Raymond Roussel’s fiction. By turning to Foucault’s comments on
Roussel, I not only contextualize the relevant concepts in Barney’s works theoretically but
also examine the implications of such a synthesis for understanding both Barney’s and
Foucault’s approaches to the body.
Roussel was an early ­t wentieth-century French poet, playwright, and novel-
ist who introduced innovative formal experiments into narrative construction. For
instance, he used homonyms in order to compose two identical sentences with differ-
ent connotations to serve as the framework—as the beginning and the end—of a narra-
tive. This approach to composition was revealed by Roussel in his How I Wrote Certain
of My Books, published posthumously. Through a detailed analysis of Roussel’s writing
techniques, Foucault arrived at the central concern of his book on the function of lan-
guage broadly speaking. Roussel’s writing apparatus made evident for Foucault that the
search for the hidden meaning in his works is futile as Roussel’s language is unequivo-
cally ­self-referential. Foucault highlights the writer’s peculiar use of words with multi-
ple meanings, a use that at once imitates and transmutes the most readily available forms
(Death and the Labyrinth 11). Hence, Foucault’s discussion of transformation is firmly
tied to Roussel’s use of words as well as narrative construction, discussed below.
According to Foucault, Roussel’s narrative structure creates a “closed discourse, her-
metically sealed by its repetitions” (77). Descriptions in Roussel’s works supersede the
story line, where the plot becomes almost “a pretext for description” (Ashbery xxii). As
Foucault argues, Roussel purposefully sets “up an additional barrier within the language,
part of a whole system of invisible paths, evasions, and subtle defenses” (10). An exam-
ple of this evasion occurs in Roussel’s last published New Impressions of Africa. In order
to follow a sentence, one needs to turn the pages back and forth to read its beginning and
end separated by up to five other excessively long sentences in parentheses planted in
between. As a result, as John Ashbery has argued, the ideas are “buried in the surround-
ing verbiage like the central sphere in a Chinese puzzle” (xxv). Roussel’s writing func-
tions as a labyrinth of words in which no meaning is certain.
Foucault describes one of the extravagant scenes in the novel Locus Solus: “the mar-
vellous flying machine that, equipped with magnets, sails, and wheels, bends to calcu-
lated breaths of air and deposits little enamel cobblestones on the sand, from which a
mosaic emerges, wants to say and to show forth only the extraordinary meticulousness
of its construction; it signifies itself ” (“Speaking and Seeing” 25). This privileging of the
process of construction stems from the fact that Roussel often ordered different figures
as well as other elements in the narrative according to their phonetic attributes, granting
them wildly unpredictable characteristics.7 Hence the insistent use of the image of laby-
rinth in Foucault’s book, as Roussel invites his readers into the “labyrinth of words, con-
structed according to an inaccessible architecture and subject only to its own play” (27).
The elusiveness of meaning comes to the fore.
In Foucault’s reading, Roussel’s work doubles the labyrinthine and transformational
quality of language with discipline, proposing a multifaceted reflection on metamor-
phosis. The theme of discipline in Foucault’s book on Roussel needs to be distinguished
from the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power developed a decade later in his Dis-
cipline and Punish: rather than modern mechanisms of power, here he is concerned with
Roussel’s ­self-referential language. The strict discipline of Roussel’s writing process itself
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  161

needs to be highlighted: for instance, the time and effort it took the author to produce
lengthy digressions, introduced in parentheses in his ­above-mentioned New Impres-
sions of Africa, while keeping with the alexandrine rhyming convention.8 In this poem,
each of the four cantos is a long sentence spiraling out of control with endless lists often
connected by visual analogies and with multiplying brackets containing disruptive par-
enthetic thoughts.9 This elaborate discipline in formal construction is doubled with a
complex procedure involved in Roussel’s use of language. As mentioned, his narratives
are composed between identical homonym sentences that bracket the narratives they
generate; the points of departure and arrival meet each other. Spatial and temporal order
is still preserved but could easily be reshuffled, creating, according to Foucault, “forms
without parentage or species” (Death and the Labyrinth 19). Such formal experiments
invite the reader into a labyrinth of meanings. The sentences demonstrate unbridled
potential for alternative connotations, for transformation into their doubles. Moreover,
the linear narrative form in Roussel’s poetry and prose is disrupted through protracted
lists, obsessively detailed descriptions, and parenthetic digressions.
There is a striking parallel between the narratives constructed in the Drawing
Restraint series and Roussel’s prose, especially in terms of a ­self-referential logic that cre-
ates a closed system and repetitiveness. The visual narratives of the Drawing Restraint
series follow a similar hermetic, ­non-linear logic in which restraint is presented as the
double of the drawing process. The artist’s biological account of hypertrophic muscle
development and of the metabolic process acts as an internal logic driving the perfor-
mative actions.10 So Roussel’s “hermetically sealed” narratives, constructed according to
strict compositional procedures, find their parallel in the biological analogy to hypertro-
phy as well as in Barney’s system of The Path developed for the Drawing Restraint series,
a system that connects actions and narrative events that may otherwise seem unconnect-
ed.11 In this system, discipline acts as the double of transformation of form.
Another visual concept relevant in this context is the shape of an oval horizontally
crossed with a rectangular bar that reoccurs throughout Barney’s oeuvre in the form of
drawings or sculptures or even as a stage where a performance takes place. Called by the
artist the “field emblem,” this shape is featured as a logo in several of Barney’s films: in
the opening scene of Drawing Restraint 9, two carefully wrapped boxes sport the “field
emblem” as a golden sticker (00:04:50–00:05:58). The “field emblem” is a representation
of an orifice and its closure, an imposed resistance (see Spector 7) or another visually and
conceptually obstructive device, one could say.12 The drawing titled Drawing Restraint 7:
Spin track manual: KID (1993) features two field emblems made using graphite pencil,
acrylic, and petroleum jelly and placed in a 35.6 × 36.5 × 6.7 cm nylon frame (ix). (See
figure 8.) The practice of drawing occupies a significant place in Barney’s project, but the
works are often exhibited unconventionally in frames made of nylon and various plas-
tics such as a ­self-lubricating one. The frame is particularly interesting in this piece as it
incorporates a plastic speculum, a tool used for bodily orifices employed here for open-
ing the artificial orifice of the drawing while highlighting the act of seeing into the body
of the artwork and the tension between visibility and opacity. In this exposure of the
internal space of the drawing, the viewer’s attention is also directed to the frame itself as
well as to the boundaries of the work. Barney describes his approach to framing as cre-
ating “an internal space that a prosthetic orifice opened up to reveal”; plastic speculums
are used on frames as if “the orifice constructed its own speculum to open it wider so one
could see deeper into this internal space” (“Matthew Barney: Modern Heroes” 31). The
162   The Body in Theory

Figure 8. Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 7: spin track manual: KID, 1993. Graphite,
acrylic paint, petroleum jelly on paper in nylon frame. 14 × 14–3/8 × 2–5/8 inches (35.6 × 36.5 ×
6.7 cm). © 2019 Matthew Barney (courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels).

forced visual openness does not make the drawing, closed in its ­self-referentiality, any
less impenetrable for the viewer. The access to the work is disrupted through the viewer’s
oscillating gaze between the drawing and the frame, and the medium and the unusual use
of the materials become the central focus.
The materials that Barney chooses for this work, and for the series more generally,
have a particular metamorphic quality that is important to consider for further inves-
tigating the link between metamorphosis and discipline: ­self-lubricating plastic and
petroleum jelly are materials of choice for the artist’s drawings and sculptures. First,
­self-lubricating plastic is an inorganic material that is accepted by the body when used
internally (for orthopedic implants to manage friction, for instance); it acts as organic
material in an organic environment, having adaptable metamorphic qualities. Petro-
leum jelly or petrolatum (Vaseline) has a similarly malleable quality: it changes through
pressure and temperature; for instance, it liquefies when heated. Christian Scheidemann
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  163

Figure 9. Matthew Barney, Occidental Restraint, 2005. Petroleum jelly and self-lubricating
plastic. Installed dimensions variable. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Photograph: Hyunsoo Kim
(installation view courtesy Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea).

describes Barney’s use of this material: “When heated it is liquid, pourable, and unpre-
dictable. When refrigerated, it becomes hard and crystalline, disciplined” (132). Petro-
leum jelly is often presented as a solid cast—as Olympic barbell in Drawing Restraint 3
(Matthew Barney 1987–2002 31–33)—or shown in liquefied state—as in several scenes of
Drawing Restraint 9 (5: 108). Alternatively, it is first poured into a harness, then refriger-
ated to make the shape solid; after this the harness is removed, the mold collapses, and
the collapsed sculpture is shown as the finished work. An example of the last variant is
Occidental Restraint (2005), a collapsed petroleum jelly cast with ­self-lubricating plas-
tic elements shown at the 2005 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition as part
of Drawing Restraint 9 (5: 115–17). These objects described by critics as “collapsing sculp-
tures” (Scheidemann 125) are often of sizable proportions (approximately 100 × 100 × 100
inches), and refrigerating them could take weeks. (See figure 9.) The transformational
quality of the material explains its prominent place within the project. As petrolatum
objects oscillate between raw or formless and disciplined or solid states, they embody the
metamorphic potential of the project.
Drawing Restraint 9 presents spectacular, lingering scenes focusing on pouring,
solidifying, and cutting a large petroleum jelly cast that takes up a noticeable propor-
tion of the film. The ­25-ton object is placed on the deck of Nishiin Maru, the whale hunt-
ing and processing ship from Japan where the narrative unfolds (Matthew Barney 2005
7). The object unmistakably follows the shape of the “field emblem” seen at the beginning
164   The Body in Theory

Figure 10. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005. 135 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Pro-
duction still: Chris Winget (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).

of the film; the commentators have also likened this form to a whale “with the bar serv-
ing as flippers” (Broglio 128–29).13 (See figure 10.) Ron Broglio analyzes the scene when
the field emblem spills across the deck as representing a collapse of safe distance between
the work and the viewer (131). (See figure 11.) The tactile quality that he focuses on in the
film is even more pronounced in the Occidental Restraint sculpture (figure 9) as it phys-
ically invades the gallery space and thus makes a stronger visceral impact. Considering
that the field emblem is analogous of the body more generally and, in the above scene, of
the whale’s body (128–29), the messiness and ­semi-formlessness of these objects render
the bodily boundaries as unstable and permeable, and the body itself becomes a subject
of metamorphic processes. One could argue that metamorphosis is not a linear process
achieved in movement from a formless, undisciplined state to a fixed, disciplined form
but precisely what oscillates in between, opening up to polymorphous possibilities of
transformation.
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  165

Figure 11. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005. 135 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Pro-
duction still: Chris Winget (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).

Finally, the Drawing Restraint series poses athletic training as a form of metamor-
phosis, where bodily transformation meets the artistic creation of form, where the artis-
tic and athletic fields merge. The significant part of the project exposes the body to
­never-ending physical challenges and constraints. Along with the purposeful use of real
training equipment such as trampoline, dumbbells, wrestling mats, and climbing equip-
ment, the ­non-utilitarian objects are sculpted in the form of sports equipment, such as
the barbell in Drawing Restraint 3. Barney’s earlier sculptural installation titled Transex-
ualis (1991) was made of petroleum jelly cast as exercise equipment and included refrig-
erated vessels carrying human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), formed in a fertilized
egg after conception. This hormone can increase muscle mass and stamina when used
in combination with other anabolic steroids (Spector 10).14 While HCG is used to main-
tain normal testosterone production to restore the body after the effects of the steroids, it
disrupts testosterone levels with continuous use. Here, the ambition to master the bodily
166   The Body in Theory

performance always meets the limit of such disciplining attempts: the damage done to
the body over time. Competitive sport culture cited through the employment of training
props, whether it is climbing or bodybuilding, always already includes its own double (or
even nemesis): a vulnerable body that needs to be assisted. This doubling ceaselessly pro-
duces more achievements and failures in an endless loop. The enactment of athleticism,
the demonstration of the skill, and the excessive effort have no practical goal, no clear
attainment, and no narrative closure. It is a ­self-referential, ­self-reproducing activity, and
the process of transformation itself is what matters.
The performances, the video actions, and the material used in the Drawing Restraint
series thematically interlink discipline with metamorphic processes in a number of
ways.15 As discussed earlier, Foucault’s reading outlines a similar kind of doubling. Fou-
cault notes that the world Roussel creates with its ­multi-faceted beings is described with
“the patience of the trainer”:
[I]n this world of performance—of only theatrical results—training equals transmutation. Of
course, long hours of patience are required and innumerable rehearsals; but the result is so per-
fect and the virtuosity of the animals has become so great that these marvellous skills come into
play as if they were a profound essence [Death and the Labyrinth 82].
Barney’s expert enactments of athletes, with the amount of effort exerted and patience
required to endure the ­self-imposed ordeals and the resulting transformation, become
an end in itself: an aesthetic and conceptual object in its own right. At the same time,
in Roussel’s narratives we find a similar kind of discipline devoid of the practical out-
come, pertaining to a ­self-referential activity. In the Drawing Restraint series, discipline
is placed in the realm of potential, involving metamorphic processes. In Roussel’s world,
“training equals transmutation” (Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 82), one that cele-
brates the prowess of unimaginable hybrids and the scientists, such as Martial Conterel
from Locus Solus, who have devised them.

Doubling as Metamorphosis
The idea of doubling presents itself as an undercurrent in both the visual and the lit-
erary work under consideration. Doubling plays out in the Drawing Restraint project in
how the athletic body is perpetually doubled with its nemesis, a vulnerable body. In addi-
tion, the ­ever-present “field emblem” represents the doubling of an orifice and its closure.
There are also ­self-referential doublings of openness and closure on a more conceptual
level in The Path and, more importantly, recurrent doubles of drawing and restraint and
of discipline and transformation.
The idea of doubling is one of the less prevalent but nevertheless very important
themes that draws Foucault’s attention in Roussel’s work. Doubling enters Roussel’s work,
first of all, via his use of double meaning, in which “a word, like a gaudy cardboard face,
hides what it duplicates, and is separated from it only by the slightest layer of darkness”;
for Foucault, this doubling of meaning is akin to repetition “by the mask on top, of the
face” (Death and the Labyrinth 18). The distance between repetition and double mean-
ing in Roussel defines his work. In his highly controlled system of composition, Roussel
chooses a word with a double meaning, using its least likely connotation as the starting
point of his narrative (Ashbery xxiii); then he further expands this creative method, giv-
ing the words “a meaning other than that which first came to mind” (Roussel, “How I
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  167

Wrote Certain of My Books” 4). He employs a duality of language: language that divides
itself in two, producing different, distant meanings that meet in one word, in one form
that is “dual, ambiguous, ­Minotaur-like” (Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 14). As Fou-
cault puts it, “It’s a proliferation of distance, a void created in the wake of the double, a
labyrinthine extension of corridors which seem similar and yet are different” (14). The
form of the word remains unchanged, but its meaning transforms through doubling.
While these ideas could be related on an abstract level to the understanding of train-
ing as doubling in the Drawing Restraint series (formless energy and creation of form, and
desire and discipline), the notion of the double would need to be explored in its broader
connotations. This way Foucault’s discussion of doubling and transformation or, one could
say, doubling as metamorphosis can be shown to go beyond the literary domain. Gilles
Deleuze has argued that the theme of the double has “always haunted Foucault” (97), and
it also needs to be linked to Foucault’s major project, an exploration of the subject. Deleuze
elaborates the Foucauldian double in terms of the self ’s relationship to the Other:
[T]he double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the
outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of
the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not the emanation of an ‘I,’ but something that
places in immanence an always other or a ­Non-self. It is never the other who is a double in the
doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other: I do not encounter myself
on the outside, I find the other in me [98].
Hence, the double/doubling is what destabilizes the self/other dichotomy as a binary by
incorporating the difference into the ­self-same.
Foucault’s book on Roussel plays a particularly important role in Foucault’s theori-
zation of the double. According to Deleuze, this is due to Roussel’s particular use of par-
enthetic writing (sentences multiplied within the sentence) as well as of language more
generally, namely, the discovery of “the phrase of the outside, its repetition in a second
phrase, the minuscule difference between the two (the ‘snag’ […]) and the twisting and
doubling from one to the other”; in addition, Roussel’s use of the word doublure, rework-
ing and collapsing its different meanings, shows “how the inside was always the fold-
ing of a presupposed outside” (98–99). One of Foucault’s most famous doubles, power
and knowledge, is an example of how this “hallucinatory theme” of the double/doubling,
according to Deleuze, “transforms any ontology” (102, 112). Thus, the double features as
a conceptual device that has metamorphic potential, suggesting a possibility for trans-
forming the humanist notion of the subject.

Posthumanist Metamorphosis
In Foucault’s analysis, as we saw, Roussel’s “hermetically sealed” discourse follows a
­self-referential logic connecting events and figures that are wildly disjointed. In his intro-
duction to Foucault’s book on Roussel, James Faubion argues that Roussel, as one of the
pioneers of the puzzle of language itself, as someone who points at the ­self-referentiality
of language and its fragmented nature, has guided Foucault to his conclusion regard-
ing the end of “man,” represented through the vision of man as a face drawn in sand that
would one day be erased (­xvi–xvii). Use of a language that is freed from any expectation
that it is anything other than ­self-referential (xvii), as is the case in Roussel’s writing, is
the beginning of this erasure.
168   The Body in Theory

In his book What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe highlights the fact that Foucault’s
assertion of “man” as a historically specific entity has been crucial for the development of
the radical theoretical framework of posthumanism (xii, xxv).16 Drawing out the posthu-
manist implications of Foucauldian engagement with the work of Roussel that challenges
anthropocentrism is especially pertinent in light of Faubion’s comment.
In its ­anti-anthropocentric gesture, Roussel’s use of metamorphosis challenges the
boundaries between humans, animals, and inanimate objects. At times, his protracted
lists attribute a typically human action or a state to animals and objects. Thus, “a lamp-
post, a thermometer, a billiard ball, the sole of a shoe, hot milk, and a wall” partake in the
state of wondering (Ford 8).17 A bird communicates with Saturn through a ­trance-like
state (Roussel, “How I Wrote Certain of My Books” 12). A cat electrifies Georges Danton’s
severed head “to make him repeat his old speech” in a complete disregard for the hier-
archies of species (Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 80–81). At the same time, Foucault
speaks of the “apparatuses” of Locus Solus, referring to Roussel’s bizarre constructions,
such as the flying object described earlier, as machines “exactly and above all when they
are alive”: “They do not speak; they work serenely in a gestural circularity in which the
silent glory of their automatism is affirmed” (“Speaking and Seeing” 25).
In his poetry and prose, Roussel irregularly joins completely unrelated elements
regardless of the hierarchy of species; the result feels like the occurrence of “a violent
short circuit” (Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 79). His narratives, Foucault argues,
connect the common Western mythologies:
space that is rigid and forbidden, surrounding the quest, the return, and the treasure (that’s the
geography of the Argonauts and of the Labyrinth); and the other space—communicating, poly-
morphous, continuous, and irreversible—of the metamorphosis […], of the visible transforma-
tion of instantly crossed distances, of strange affinities, of symbolic replacement (the place of
the human beast) [80].
In Roussel’s metamorphoses, there are particularly extravagant kinds of amalgams: the
beings most inconceivable in terms of distance and incompatibility of elements are joined
together beyond any reasonable dimensional relations (79). What stands out about this
kind of metamorphosis is that, as Foucault argues, it replaces a continuity of being with
a total discontinuity and a ­non-hierarchical description. The old narratives that reor-
dered and ­re-inscribed the metamorphic confusion within mythology, that “gave order
in mythology to the confusion of metamorphosis […] are now replaced by a discontinu-
ous vertical figure which hides even greater powers to disturb” (81). This ­non-traditional
metamorphosis repeatedly imagines discontinuous encounters of elements that can
hardly be thought together. It does not follow order and time, and “there remains an
immobile and definitely fixed gap in the general contour of the form that no evolution
will come to resolve” (82). Furthermore, unlike previous ages, when metamorphosis
aimed “to have life triumph by joining beings or cheating death by passing from one state
of being to another,” in Roussel’s works, transformation happens “in symmetry, which is
also its ­counter-meaning: the passage of life to death” (89). In other words, metamorpho-
sis is doubled with the passage to death. Moreover, in a reversal of traditional narratives
of metamorphosis, Roussel’s transformations do not carry a particular moral lesson other
than the simple collision of things in their joining: “The satisfaction of rewards or conso-
lations, the justice of punishment, the whole economy of retribution found in traditional
narratives has disappeared in favor of a joining of beings” (Death and the Labyrinth 84).
The distinction between the dead and the living itself is questioned, as it is in the “heart
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  169

which lives and is not alive” (83–84). There is only a strange form of commonality among
animal, plants, and humans.
Roussel’s narratives of metamorphosis, as examined by Foucault, could be described
as posthumanist in the sense proposed by Bruce Clarke. Clarke argues that the ideas
surrounding bodily metamorphosis in literary and visual narratives have changed
throughout history. He distinguishes the premodern, the modern, and the posthuman-
ist metamorphosis. Posthumanist metamorphosis, according to Clarke, features in more
recent narratives, generated by new media, which challenge the boundaries between
humans, animals, and machines and unsettle the notions of the human essence, demon-
strating that “the essence of the human is to have no essence” (2). The posthumanist
narrative has to imply a certain form of “symbiosis and the potential for sociality” with
posthuman agents (37). Both Barney’s and Roussel’s narratives of metamorphosis can be
characterized as posthumanist because the transformation does not lead to a destruc-
tion of posthuman metamorphs, affirming the human status quo, or to a reinstatement
of metamorphs into a natural order (10). Instead, the posthumanist affirmative approach
to metamorphs avoids recourse to the notion of human “nature” as the opposite of “post-
human monstrosity” (10–11). Appropriately, the monstrosities in Roussel’s narratives are
persistent and “without remedy” (Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 84), characteristics
that may have captured Foucault’s attention.
The posthumanist orientation of the Drawing Restraint series can be discerned
when we analyze the specific type of metamorphosis that takes place in Barney’s proj-
ect, challenging the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. In the Draw-
ing Restraint series, the artist undergoes an endless posthumanist metamorphosis by
enacting athletic as well as ­human-animal transformations. When certain characters are
performed in Barney’s videos and films, they are not clearly defined, and a shortage of
dialogue gives the audience few clues as to their role. The transformation of bodies and
the metamorphosis of sculptural forms are matched by the oscillation between the conti-
nuity and discontinuity of the narratives. In the Drawing Restraint project, episodes with
hybrids and transmutations follow Clarke’s characterization of posthumanist narrative:
they avoid giving a position of superiority to human as well as to animal or hybrid fig-
ures. There is no recourse to objectification of the nonhuman in the case of the satyrs in
Drawing Restraint 7 and the transformation of humans into whales in Drawing Restraint
9.
In Drawing Restraint 7, a hairless satyr with undeveloped horns played by Barney
(“Kid”) is driving a limousine at night over Manhattan bridges (Spector 22). The young
satyr squeezes his body inside the front seat of the limousine and spins furiously in order
to catch his own tail, which strikingly resembles an intestine (notice the link to digestion
as part of The Path). He transforms into an indefinable form, a collection of twisted limbs
that merges with the machine. (See figure 12.) The ­human-animal hybrid is coupled with
the inorganic, mechanical body. The boundaries between the organic and inorganic, the
inside and outside are shown to be permeable and unfixed. Twisting through the front
seat, the Kid still holds on to the wheel and manages to maneuver the vehicle.
In the back seat of the car, two adult satyrs—one part ram and another part goat—
are immersed in athletic wrestling coupled with an artistic contest. (See figure 13.) The
task is to accomplish a drawing in the condensation formed on the limousine’s moon
roof as they struggle. The ­goat-satyr tries to forcefully draw a line using the ­ram-satyr’s
horn, but leaving a mark becomes the beginning of a lethal conflict. The drawing is left
170   The Body in Theory

Figure 12. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 7, 1993. Three-channel video, color, silent, with
three monitors, enameled steel, internally lubricated plastic, and six high-abuse fluorescent
lighting fixtures, dimensions variable. 2:25/9:00/1:26 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Video still:
Peter Strietmann; screen capture from CRT monitor (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).

unfinished. The satyrs flay each other, joints are broken, ligaments and cartilage torn,
horns pulled out, and the upholstery in the front seat is skinned. The mechanical body of
the limousine is an equal participant or even a protagonist of the events, as it shares the
destiny of the hybrids.
One of the most striking scenes of metamorphosis within the series occurs in Draw-
ing Restraint 9, where the two newlywed protagonists called “Occidental Guests” (played
by Barney and his then partner, the famous musician Björk) transform into whales and
swim away from the Nishiin Maru, which glides alongside the patches of icebergs. The
transformation unfolds in the cabin, a ­t ea-room, gradually filled with murky liquid
petroleum jelly; it lasts for about twenty minutes.18 While the ship’s crew as host is busy
flensing the petroleum jelly cast/whale on the deck, the guests show one another their
developing blowholes. Slowly, ­piece-by-piece, in an intimate embrace, the characters cut
off one another’s submerged lower limbs in a manner that alludes to the whale flens-
ing procedure. (See figures 14 and 15.) Eventually, the human legs give way to tails. The
metamorphs flee objectification while, as Broglio argues, the flensing knives are equally
directed at human and nonhuman. This “literally cuts away at a conception of privileged
interiority of the human subject” while the “whale slaughter’s syntax and form as a lan-
guage of death and consumption” are turned toward transformation (130).
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  171

Figure 13. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 7, 1993. Three-channel video, color, silent, with
three monitors, enameled steel, internally lubricated plastic, and six high-abuse fluorescent
lighting fixtures, dimensions variable. 2:25/9:00/1:26 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Video still:
Peter Strietmann; screen capture from CRT monitor (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).

The self has irrevocably transformed, while the human body is exposed as mere “lay-
ers of flesh and organs that shift in shape and function according to different assem-
blages” (131). Clarke argues that narratives of metamorphosis are “testing and contesting
the boundaries of ‘identities’ and their psychic and social regimes” (46). Here, the meta-
morphosis of the human body and subjectivity is achieved through the open wound,
through cutting open the body and the self. Rather than projecting the interior to the
outside, metamorphosis interiorizes the outside, as Deleuze explains in his commen-
tary on Foucault’s notion of the double. Metamorphosis introduces difference within the
Same, redoubles the Other—in our case, the marine creature—within the self. In this
­n on-anthropocentric, ­n on-hierarchical placement, the body of the sculpture (“field
emblem”) stands in for the body of the whale, while bodies of the guests become whale
bodies. The human self lives as the double of the animal other. The body and subjectivity
here are a site of metamorphosis, of potentiality, where narratives pertaining to biology
and to species boundaries are disrupted.19
Discussion of metamorphosis in Roussel’s work enables Foucault to start rethink-
ing the notion of the self in a manner that goes beyond a humanist framework. The self
becomes a site of metamorphosis, of potentiality, where the traditional humanist bound-
aries of the rational, autonomous, and universal subject are disrupted. There is a frequent
172   The Body in Theory

Figure 14. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005. 135 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Pro-
duction still: Chris Winget (courtesy Matthew Barney Studio).

analogy or doubling in Roussel’s writing between humans and animals as actors, for
instance, in his dizzying narratives. Animals share the human characteristic of snobbery,
while humans observe their own instincts in pigs and “in ­life-saving dogs plunging into
the water” (Roussel, New Impressions of Africa 191). Roussel asks,
Can one even be sure that God, when he made snobbery
[… … … … … … … … … … … … … …. ],
Decreed it to be an attribute only of mankind? (187, 191).20
Like Roussel’s marvelous beings, the transformations of the Drawing Restraint series do
not deliver a moral message but focus on the process itself, repetitive but not reversible. Bar-
ney’s and Roussel’s works share the presence of complex, persistent metamorphs. In these
­self-referential narratives, which are mainly carried by an internal labyrinthine logic that
appears both surreal and convincing, the human escapes subjectification, while the nonhu-
man escapes objectification, following Clarke’s take on posthumanist metamorphosis.
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  173

Figure 15. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005. 135 min. © 2019 Matthew Barney. Video
still: Peter Strietmann; still taken from the scene shot underwater (courtesy Matthew Barney
Studio).

Thinking through the lens of posthumanism about metamorphosis as theorized

by Foucault alongside diverse transformations taking place in the Drawing Restraint
series—use of materials with metamorphic qualities, bodily transformation through dis-
ciplined training, boundary crossing between species—opens up possibilities for con-
tinuing Foucault’s project of the decentering of the humanist subject. Metamorphosis,
especially when linked to the Foucauldian notion of doubling, emerges as resistance to
normative human subjectivity, normative modes of “subjectivation” and, thus, “individ-
ualizing” power (Deleuze 105). As Deleuze put it, “The struggle for subjectivity presents
itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis” (106).21

Notes
1. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barney describes this link: “the condition of hypertrophy [...]
[is used] as an analogy for the creative process. I was thinking about the way muscle tissue within the body
depends on resistance in order to grow, and how it might make a case for resistance as a prerequisite for
creativity. [...] The principle of resistance training is that you exhaust your muscles, effectively tearing them
down, then resting for a period to allow those muscles to heal. During that healing period, they become stron-
ger and larger. I always imagined it as an ascending sine curve of growth and recovery. [...] [T]here was an
attempt to take this biological fact, these ways of mapping the processes within the body, as a way of describing
a larger aesthetic system” (Matthew Barney 1987–2002 87).
2. While most Drawing Restraint performances were enacted in front of the camera, Drawing Restraint 5
(1989) took place in front of an audience (Matthew Barney 1987–2002 47). Drawing Restraint 6 (1989) was an
undocumented performance that was recreated in 2004 (55).
3. For diagrams with trajectories of the climbs, see Matthew Barney: Prayer 69–70, 72, 74.
4. Elsewhere Barney describes “Situation” as “a raw drive or hunger [...] where subject matter is indiscrimi-
nately consumed,” and “Condition” as “a disciplinary funnel” that “takes content that Situation had consumed
and begins to give it form” (Mathew Barney 1987–2002 88).
5. I draw a parallel between ­second-order systems theorist Niklas Luhmann’s theory of ­self-referentially
closed systems and Barney’s projects in my article analyzing the Cremaster cycle (117–23, 127–28). I explore
174   The Body in Theory

these ideas to conceptualize the artist’s notion of the “hermetic state” (116, 123–24). For Luhmann, closure is
necessary for the interaction of a system with its environment, which is significantly more complex than a sys-
tem, and this organization of a system “postulates closure as a condition of openness” (12). Such an approach
rethinks a simple dichotomous relationship between closure and openness in a way that the two are inter-
linked in operation of any system, be it art or a living organism. These ideas are fruitful for understanding
Barney’s artistic system as both closed and open, oscillating between flow of energy and its restraint, formless
energy and its disciplined form.
6. Barney’s own evaluation of his project supports this point: it “is a kind of ­cross-fertilization between
the desire to make, and the discipline to continue making, while trying not to let creative energy dissipate by
allowing one’s practice to take a concrete form” (Mathew Barney 1987–2002 88).
7. Roussel describes his method of composing poetry in his later works as involving “unforeseen creation
due to phonic combinations” (“How I Wrote Certain of My Books” 11).
8. See Mark Ford’s introduction to New Impressions of Africa (2–3, 13). Ford also adds that “the ingenious
constraints” that Roussel imposed upon himself in the process of composing poems “were a practical way of
disciplining his almost unstoppable poetic fluency” (3).
9. Roussel comments on his meticulous approach: “it is difficult to conceive of the immense amount of
time involved in composing this type of verse” (“How I Wrote Certain of My Books” 18).
10. Most of Barney’s performances are presented in the gallery space as looping videos, viewed by the
audience at a random entry point. Thus, the manner in which the narratives of these works are experienced
enhances their ­non-linearity. Drawing Restraint 9, the longest piece in the series with a running time over 135
minutes, has possibly the most pronounced narrative structure but nevertheless lacks clear closure. When
viewed in a gallery, the length of this work is likely to encourage the audience to exit or ­re-enter in the mid-
dle of the screening. When Barney’s videos are viewed on multiple screens—Drawing Restraint 7 (1993) is
screened as a ­three-channel installation (Matthew Barney 1987–2007 74)—the resolution of the work is fur-
ther interrupted as the viewer shifts his or her attention between the simultaneously unfolding events.
11. A related recurrent theme in Barney’s work is his “hermetic state,” which is linked to ­self-imposed resis-
tance and closure (Chkhaidze 116). Barney connects this notion to potentiality, namely, to the possibility of
form: if the cycle of discipline and desire “goes back and forth enough times something that’s really elusive can
slip out—a form that has form, but isn’t overdetermined” (“Travels in Hypertrophia” 71).
12. Nancy Spector considers this symbol as both anthropomorphic and architectural, as a floor for actions
and Barney’s corporate logo (7).
13. Petroleum jelly starts its transformation into a solid state below thirty to forty degrees celsius (Matthew
Barney 2005 21). Once it solidifies, the mold is removed and the references to a whale’s body become apparent:
“the black whale ‘skin,’ grooves, and ridges of its outer body. Workers wield long staves with sharp knives on
the end to cut at the outer ‘skin’ of the mold until it sheers away and reveals the inner white petroleum, which
stands thick like whale blubber” (Broglio 129).
14. Norman Bryson argues that Barney’s sculptures of sports equipment “superimpose equipment on
metabolism by building apparatus [sic] out of biochemical substances [...]. The body implied by the dual oper-
ation of equipment and metabolism dramatically erases the distinction between what is inside and what is out-
side the body” (31).
15. I have analyzed a recurrent character in Barney’s Cremaster cycle, the famous escape artist Harry Hou-
dini, as the figure representing “training that leads to alteration of form” and the “master of disciplined train-
ing and metamorphosis” (124). Houndini could also be thought of as a figure of the doubling of ­self-discipline
with transformation.
16. Wolfe’s definition of the term “posthumanism” emphasizes the philosophical and political significance
of the challenge to anthropocentrism, i.e., to the “man” of humanism as rational autonomous subject whose
ontology is based on the human/animal distinction (What is Posthumanism? xvi). It is not simply a devel-
opment that comes after humanism (xv–xvi), nor is it a pronouncement of the death of the subject. Rather,
posthumanism stresses the damaging speciesist structures that reproduce the “fantasy figure” called “man”
(Animal Rites 6), “fundamentally a prosthetic creature” (What is Posthumanism? xxv) that cannot be separated
from its discursive and material embeddedness in various ahuman forms.
17. John Ashbery argues that Roussel creates “a universe in which people are merely objects and objects are
endowed with an almost human hostility” (xxii). It is also noteworthy that Ashbery attributes Roussel’s writ-
ing with “inhuman beauty” (xxvii).
18. See Drawing Restraint 5: 113. Broglio maintains that the liquid is a mixture of seawater and petroleum
from the field emblem, which is in this case a ­stand-in for a whale (129).
19. Discussing Drawing Restraint 9 in “The Cycle of Restraint and Creation—A Mythology of the 21st
Century,” Yuko Hasegawa has argued that the use of flensing knives and techniques in the above scene rep-
resents “a deep consideration of the spirituality inherited in the flensing technique,” a type of “a homage to
whales that had, through dissection, nurtured human lives” (Matthew Barney 2005 14). The author notes that
“Barney’s philosophy [...] belongs to the world of transformational tales; that of pre–Christian mythology
and alchemy” (9). While focusing on premodern metamorphic narratives, this reading does not explore the
­non-hierarchical, ­non-anthropocentric nature of the transformation with its distinctly posthumanist ethos.
 Posthumanist Metamorphosis and Discipline (Chkhaidze)  175

20. These two lines are separated by a long succession of additional lines included in the single brackets
that ponder the differences and similarities between humans and animals.
21. I am very grateful to Matthew Barney for giving me permission to reproduce a selection of images from
the Drawing Restraint series in my essay. I would also like to thank the staff at his studio for providing me
with the image files along with Natalie ­Oleksy-Piekarski, the Senior Archivist at Sadie Coles HQ, for her con-
tinuous help in the process. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this piece to Lamara Kereselidze, whose intellec-
tual encouragement and tireless emotional support enabled me to pursue a broad range of academic interests
throughout my life, including some of the central concerns of this essay.

Works Cited
Ashbery, John. Introduction. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, by Michel Foucault,
translated by Charles Ruas, Doubleday and Company, 1986, pp. xiii–xxviii.
Barney, Matthew, director. DRAWING RESTRAINT 7: Spin track manual: KID. 1993. Subliming Vessel: The
Drawing of Matthew Barney, by Isabelle Dervaux et al., The Morgan Library & Museum, Skira Rizzoli Pub-
lications, 2013, p. ix.
_____. Drawing Restraint 9. Mike Bellon/Barbara Gladstone, 2005.
_____. “Matthew Barney: Modern Heroes.” Interview conducted by Jérôme Sans. Art Press, no. 204, ­July-Aug.
1995, pp. 25–32.
_____. “Travels in Hypertrophia.” Interview conducted by Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve. Artforum, vol. 33, no. 9,
May 1995, pp. 66–71.
Broglio, Ron. Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Posthumanities.
Bryson, Norman. “Matthew Barney’s Gonadotrophic Cavalcade.” Parkett, no. 45, 1995, pp. 29–33.
Chkhaidze, Irina. “Posthumanism in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle: Autopoiesis and the ‘Hermetic
State.’” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, vol. 7, Dec. 2015, pp. 107–30.
Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems, Fordham University Press, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán Hand, foreword by Paul Bové, University of Minne-
sota Press, 1988.
Faubion, James. “General Introduction.” Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, by Michel
Foucault, translated by Charles Ruas, postscript by John Ashbery, Continuum, 2004, pp. vii–xxii.
Ford, Mark. Introduction. New Impression of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Ford, Princeton
University Press, 2001, pp. 1–17.
Foucault, Michel. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Translated by Charles Ruas, intro-
duction by John Ashbery, Doubleday and Company, 1986.
_____. “Speaking and Seeing in Raymond Roussel.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D.
Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 1998, pp. 21–32. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, general
editor, Paul Rabinow, vol. 2, The New Press, 1997–2000.
Luhmann, Niklas. “Autopoiesis of Social Systems.” Essays on ­Self-Reference, Columbia University Press, 1990,
pp. 1–20.
Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 1987–2002. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, fiction by Francis McKee, vol. 1,
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2005. 6 vols.
Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 1987–2007. Edited by Melissa Larner, text by Neville Wakefield et al., vol.
5, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007. 6 vols.
Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 2005. Texts by Yuko Hasegawa, Luc Steels, and Shinichi Nakazawa, vol. 2,
Uplink, 2005. 6 vols.
Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail. Text by Neville Wakefield et al., Schaulager/
Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2010.
Roussel, Raymond. “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.” How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated by
Trevor Winkfield and Kenneth Koch, and with essays by John Ashbery, SUN, 1977, pp. 3–19.
_____. New Impression of Africa. Translated by Mark Ford, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Scheidemann, Christian. “Notes from the Laboratory.” All in the Present Must be Transformed: Matthew Bar-
ney and Joseph Beuys, Deutsche Guggenheim, 2006, pp. 124–39.
Spector, Nancy. “Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us.” Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, Guggen-
heim Museum, 2002, pp. 3–91.
Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago Uni-
versity Press, 2003.
_____. What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Posthumanities.
 About the Contributors

Lauren Jane Barnett is a freelance writer and lecturer in London. Her past publications include
“Beauty and Alienation in Medical Photography” in Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine
and “Cookie in Her Casket as a response to the Medical Death” in the ­e-book And Death Shall Have
Dominion (2015). She is working on a book on British horror cinema.
Leon S. Brenner is a research fellow at the University of Potsdam, specializing in the fields of Laca-
nian psychoanalysis, contemporary French philosophy, and autism research. His doctoral disser-
tation concerned the subject of autistic subjectivity in psychoanalytic thought. He works on the
subject of the philosophical anthropology of autism at the University of Potsdam’s Institute for
Philosophy. He is the founder of the Lacanian Affinities Berlin group (laLAB) and teaches courses
on the subject of psychoanalysis.
Marina Cano is a teaching fellow in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author
of Jane Austen and Performance, the first exploration of the performative and theatrical force of
Austen’s work and its afterlife from the nineteenth century to the present. She is also the ­coeditor
of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance. Her
research interests include women’s writing, the long nineteenth century, performance, and gen-
der theory.
Irina Chkhaidze completed her PhD in history of art at the University College London (UCL),
UK. Her publications have centered on theories of posthumanism, ­human-animal relations, and
contemporary art. Her research interests include the representation of human and nonhuman
bodies in contemporary art, ­second-order systems theory and cybernetics, and continental phi-
losophy. She teaches history of art and philosophy at Central Saint Martins and University of the
Arts London.
Dan Collins is the founder of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups (APW), an organization that
for more than twenty years has promoted clinical Lacanian psychoanalysis. APW’s conferences,
study weekends, and events attract analysts from around the United States and the world. In addi-
tion to being a translator, he writes and publishes often on psychoanalytic topics. He also lectures
widely and holds a biweekly seminar at Lacan Toronto.
Eric Daffron is a professor of literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he teaches gothic
literature and literary theory, among other subjects. He earned his PhD from ­SUNY-Buffalo. A
specialist in early British gothic literature and Michel Foucault, he has published on male homo-
sociality, gothic literature, literary theory, and other topics.
Claudia Di Gianfrancesco is a PhD (­ESRC-funded) candidate in psychosocial studies at Birbeck,
University of London. Her research has primarily focused on investigating the role of Boal’s The-
atre of the Oppressed in discussing constructions of femininity and masculinity through a psy-
choanalytic lens. She has trained extensively with Theatre of the Oppressed companies in Italy,
Scotland, and England.
Erica D. Galioto is an associate professor of English at Shippensburg University. Her publications
include articles on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Sapphire’s Push, and A.M. Homes’s The End of Alice.

177
178   About the Contributors

“Teaching Fun Home as a Narrative of Trauma in the English Classroom” was published in an
edited collection, and “Maternal Ambivalence in the Novel and Film We Need to Talk About Kevin”
was featured in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2019).
John Halbrooks is an associate professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where he
specializes in medieval literature. He has published on a range of topics, including Chaucer, the
troubadours, and The Battle of Maldon. He is working on a book on the human/animal binary in
Chaucer’s poetry.
Michael Loadenthal is a researcher, trainer, professor, and author who serves as the executive
director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the founder and executive director of the
Prosecution Project. His research focuses on political violence, social movements, security, polic-
ing, and repression. His book, The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence,
provides a discursive analysis of global, clandestine, insurrectionary anarchist networks.
Becky R. McLaughlin is a professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where she
teaches courses in critical theory, drama, early American literature, film, and gender studies. She
has published essays on topics such as fetishism, feminine jouissance, sexual fantasy, epistemolog-
ical trauma, ­auto-ethnography, the voice, and rock music. In 2020 she published Hysteria, Perver-
sion, and Paranoia in The Canterbury Tales.
Calum Neill is an associate professor of psychoanalysis and cultural theory at Edinburgh Napier
University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is director of the research group Lacan In Scotland. He is
the author of three monographs, including Jacques Lacan: The Basics, the ­coeditor of the three vol-
umes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits, and the ­coeditor of the Palgrave Lacan Series.
Michiko Oki is an independent researcher and writer in the fields of arts and literature. Her
research focuses on the representation of violence in the form of allegory and fiction in modern
and contemporary visual/auditory art, culture, and literature.
Chris Vanderwees is a psychoanalyst and registered psychotherapist at St. John the Compassion-
ate Mission in Toronto. He is also a member of Lacan Toronto (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Work-
groups), a member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, and a member of the College of
Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. He was awarded doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for his work on language,
trauma, and psychoanalysis.
Evi Verbeke is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytical psychotherapist. She works in a psy-
chiatric center, in a private practice, and at the University of Ghent (Department of Psychoanaly-
sis and Clinical Consulting) as a teaching assistant. She is pursuing a PhD on power and ethics in
contemporary psychiatry.
 Index

Abnormal (Foucault) ​13 Barney, Matthew ​see ​Drawing Restraint series

Académie d’Homme (Géricault) ​84 Barthes, Roland ​8, 115, 118–119, 121
“Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (Lacan) ​7 Bataille, George ​26, 82
alienation ​10, 35, 118, 142 Baudrillard, Jean ​121
anthropocentrism ​152, 168, 171, 174n16, 174n19 Bellmer, Hans ​6
Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) ​42 Bentham, Jeremy ​134
Apotemnophilia: ​autonomy and 8; body and 6, Berardi, Franco ​120
8–10, 12; castration and 8, 10–12; definition of 6, 9; Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) ​29
desires and 8–11; DSM classification of 9; ethical biopolitics: ​biopower as basis of 125; definition of
dimensions of 9; examples of 6; fetishism and 10; 81; docile body and 81, 126; hunchbacks and 20,
Foucault's thought and 9; Gothic fiction and 6–9, 12; 80–83, 89–90; normativity and 83; secret of 89–90;
identity and 6–7, 12; Lacan's thought and 7–8, 10–11; social control and 125; social media and 135–136;
language and 8; mirror stage and 11; normativity and surveillance and 128, 132, 135–136; transformation of
7–9, 11–12; perversion and 10–12; psychoanalysis and power into 80; violence and 80, 83, 90
8–11; subjectivity and 6–9, 11; uncanny and 7–8, 10; biopower: ​biopolitics derived from 125; body and
wholeness and 6–7, 9 13, 81; clinical gaze and 39; corpses and 34, 39–40;
Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) ​19, 53, 54n13 death and 34; definition of 39, 58, 81, 125; disabled
Ariès, Phillippe ​34, 38 body and 20; genealogy of 13, 125–126; hunchbacks
Aristophanes ​28 and 20, 80–83, 86–90; normativity and 81; operation
Armstrong, David ​35–36, 38 of 58, 81; routinization of 135; soma-ethics and 58;
art: ​artistic gaze and 41n5; body and 152; critical technology and 135; violence of 20, 80–81, 90
potential of 90; fragmentation and 83; hunchbacks The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault) ​34–35, 38
and 80, 83–84; intention in 4; life as work of 4; the body ​apotemnophilia and 6, 8–10, 12; art and 152;
metamorphosis and 151–152; modern art 80, 83–84; biological understanding of 8; biopower and 13, 81;
resistance and 21; symbolic order and 90; violence body-image 8, 12, 20, 44–45, 48–49, 58, 92–96, 103,
and 90 148; Cartesian mind/body distinction and 106–107,
Artaud, Antonin ​42 110, 112, 114; castration and 20, 74–78; clinical gaze
Ashbery, John ​160, 174n17 and 35–37; death and 6, 36; discursive body 60, 142;
Asperger, Hans ​50 drives and 28, 32; erotogenic body 44–45, 47–48,
authenticity ​14, 36, 61, 121 54n7; essentialism and 6; Foucault's understanding
Autism and Child Psychosis (Tustin) ​50 of 13, 18, 160; hunchbacks and 80–86, 90; imperfect
autistic body: ​Applied Behavioral Analysis of 53; body 59; Lacan's understanding of 6–8, 54n1, 57,
autistic objects and 50–51, 53; body without organs 140, 142, 148; language and 8–10, 44, 46, 54n1, 74,
and 19, 43, 46–53; clinical concept of 47; definition 143–145; masturbation and 14–15; metamorphosis
of 47; desires and 46, 49, 50, 53; dynamic-rim- and 171; normalization of 80–83, 85–86; ownership
body and 51–53; erotogenic body and 47–48, 54n7; of 9, 40; psychoanalysis and 7, 142; sinthôme and 140,
jouissance and 47–48, 50, 54n7; Lacanian treatment 146, 149; social body 35, 38, 125; social media and
of 19, 52–53; language and 47; normativity and 19; 128; symbolic order and 28; see also autistic body;
Other and 47–48, 54n6; overview of 19; protective- disabled body; docile body; self-destructive body
rim-body and 51–53, 54n9; psychoanalysis and 48; body integrity dysphoria (BID) ​9
scholarship on 47; subjectivity and 19, 47; symbolic “Body/Power” (Foucault) ​15
order and 19, 46–50 body without organs (BwO): ​autistic body and 19, 43,
autonomy: ​alienation of 35; anthropocentrism and 46–53; clinical conceptualization of 46; definition
171, 174n16; apotemnophilia and 8; clinical gaze of 42; desires and 45–46, 52, 53; destratification and
and 35, 37; corpses and 36, 38, 40; death and 36; 43–45, 52; dynamic-rim-body and 51–52; ego and 45;
Freud's understanding of 22n4; imagination and 8; empty body without organs 45, 47–49; erotogenic
Lacan's understanding of 8; social media and 129; body and 44–45; full body without organs 49, 52;
subjectivity and 171; traditional assumption of 171, importance of 43; jouissance and 45; Lacanian
174n16 treatment of 52–53; Lacan's thought, as break with
autosurgery ​113–114 42–44, 46–47; language and 44, 46–47; mirror stage
and 44–45; organismal stratum and 43–44, 49; Other
Bailey, Jon ​53, 54n13 and 45, 47; overview of 42–43; perversion and 46–47;
Barnett, Lauren Jane ​19, 34 protective-rim-body and 51–52; psychoanalysis and

179
180  Index

42–43; psychosis and 46–47; as regulatory principle desires: ​apotemnophilia and 8–11; autistic body and
43; significance stratum and 49; subjectification 46, 49, 50, 53; body without organs and 45–46, 52,
stratum and 45, 49; symbolic order and 44–45 53; consistent desires 43, 45–46, 52–53; drives and
Boule, Marcellin ​82, 90n1 28; immanent desires 45–46, 53; jouissance and 46;
Brenner, Leon S. ​19–20, 42 Lacan's understanding of 46, 121; language and 46;
Broglio, Ron ​164, 170, 174n18 masturbation and 15; mirror stage and 73; neurosis
Brousse, Marie-Hélène ​28 and 118; normativity and 8; objet petit a and 46, 50,
Bryson, Norman ​85, 174n14 118; Other and 116–121; pleasure principle and 46;
Burney, Frances ​105–106, 110 power and 17; selfies and 117–120; sinthôme and 149
Butler, Judith ​59, 61–62, 127 Desolation Island (O'Brian) ​108, 111–113
BwO ​ see ​body without organs Die Sieben Todsünden (Dix) ​87
“Different Spaces” (Foucault) ​15, 17
Cadava, Eduardo ​121 Di Gianfrancesco, Claudia ​19, 25
Camera Lucida (Barthes) ​115 “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its
Cano, Marina ​19–20, 68 Power” (Lacan) ​27
Capital (Marx) ​100 disabled body: ​able-body contrasted with 9, 68–69,
capitalism ​83, 117, 120–122, 147 78, 78n1; ableism and 19–20, 78; biopower and 20;
Cartesian mind/body distinction ​106–107, 110, 112, 114 castration and 20, 68, 71, 74–78; completeness and
castration: ​apotemnophilia and 8, 10–12; body and 69; definition of 70; film and 69; Foucault's thought
20, 74–78; disabled body and 20, 68, 71, 74–78; fear and 20; fragmentation and 69–73; identity and 70,
of 86; fetishism and 10; Freud's understanding of 78; impairment's relation to 74–75; Lacan's thought
10, 75–76; imagination and 75; jouissance and 10, and 20, 68–69, 71, 73, 75, 78; language and 20, 69;
76; Lacan's understanding of 20, 75–76; as lack mirror stage and 20, 68–70, 73; normativity and 68–
75; modernity and 83; psychosis and 75–76, 78; 69; overview of 19–20, 69–74; psychoanalysis and 69;
symbolic order and 75–77 representation of 69, 70–73, 75; resistance and 19–20;
Chkhaidze, Irina ​21–22, 151 social constructivism and 69, 74–75; subjectivity and
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) ​25, 82 68; symbolic order and 78
Clarke, Bruce ​152, 169, 171–172 disciplinary power ​40, 82, 124–127, 134
clinical gaze: ​alienation and 35; autonomy and 35, Discipline and Punish (Foucault) ​13, 16, 18, 81, 107–108,
37; biopower and 39; body and 35–37; corpses and 125–126, 136n5, 160
34–41; death and 34–41; definition of 35; doctor- discursive body ​60, 142
patient dynamic and 34–36, 39; identity and 35–36; Dix, Otto ​20, 80, 83, 86–88, 90
knowledge and 38–40; language and 37; living body docile body: ​biopolitics and 81, 126; knowledge and 15;
and 19, 34–36, 39–41; non-visual stimuli and 34–35, overview of 13; power and 15, 65; production of 126,
37, 40; objectification through 35–36, 40; overview 128, 135; social control and 128; social media and 128;
of 19; patient acceptance of 35–36; power and 19, technology and 135
34–41; resistance and 36–38; subjectivity and 35; Dollimore, Jonathan ​12
surgical patient and 36–37, 41n3; transformation doubling ​166–167, 171
through 34–35 Drawing Restraint series: ​art and 151–152; athletic
Cohen, Leonard ​66 training and 151–152, 159, 165–166, 174n14; audience
Collins, Dan ​20–21, 92 of 162, 173n2, 174n10; bodily restraint and 151–159;
confession ​106, 109–112, 116 body in 151–153, 166; discipline and 159–166;
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey) ​ doubling and 166–167, 171; Drawing Restraint 1
110–111 (1987), 152, 152fig; Drawing Restraint 2 (1988), 152,
Copjec, Joan ​9 152fig; Drawing Restraint 3 (1988), 152, 152fig, 163,
corps morcelé ​8, 69 165; Drawing Restraint 5 (1989), 173n2; Drawing
corpses: ​autonomy and 36, 38, 40; autopsies and 19, Restraint 6 (1989), 152, 152fig, 173n2; Drawing
36–40; biopower and 34, 39–40; clinical gaze and Restraint 7 (1993), 161, 169–170, 169fig, 174n10;
34–41; knowledge and 38–41; medicalization of 38– Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), 160–161, 163–164,
41, 41n4; power and 19, 38–40; resistance and 38–39; 164fig, 169–171, 170fig, 174n10; Drawing Restraint 11
as ultimate form of abjection 38; see also death (2005), 152, 152fig, 154; Drawing Restraint 12 (2005),
Cremaster cycle (Barney) ​173n5, 174n15 152, 152fig; Drawing Restraint 14 (2006), 152, 152fig;
Drawing Restraint 16 (2007), 152, 152fig; field emblem
Daffron, Eric ​1, 12, 18 in 161, 163–164, 166, 171; framing within 161–162;
Dakota Access Pipeline protests (2016) ​132 hypertrophy and 151–152, 154, 161, 173n1; language
Danton, Georges ​168 and 161; materials used for 162–166, 173, 174n13;
Davis, Lennard ​68–72, 74, 78n4 metamorphosis and 151, 159–173; motivations
Dean, Jodi ​120–121 behind 152, 161, 174n6, 174n11; Occidental Restraint
death: ​authenticity and 36; autonomy and 36; (2005) 163–164, 163fig; The Path system and 154, 156,
biopower and 34; body and 6, 36; clinical gaze and 159, 161, 166; posthumanism and 167–173; resistance
34–41; drives and 27–28, 32; hunchbacks and 88–89; in 151, 154; self-reference in 154, 161–162, 172, 173n5
knowledge and 39–40; Lacan's understanding of 28; drives: ​body and 28, 32; death and 27–28, 32; desires
medicalization of 38–41, 41n4; olfactory drive and and 28; Freud's understanding of 19, 27–29;
26, 32; power and 34, 37–41; resistance and 36–38; importance of 27; jouissance and 32; Lacan's
sex and 29; see also corpses understanding of 27–29, 32, 60; lamella and 28–29;
Death and the Labyrinth (Foucault) ​151, 160 language and 28; mythological accounts of 28; needs
Deleuze, Gilles ​17, 19, 22n9, 42–47, 49, 52–53, 167, 171, distinguished from 27–29; negativity of 27–28;
173 overview of 19; role of 27; sex and 28–29; sexual
 Index  181

drive 29; subjectivity and 28; see also olfactory drive Géricault, Théodore ​20, 80, 83–86, 90
DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Gherovici, Patricia ​146
Disorders) ​9 “The Golden Arm” (Twain) ​6
The Government of Self (Foucault) ​13, 22n9
Ecce Homo III (Dix) ​87 The Grand Mystery (Swift) ​27
Écrits (Lacan) ​27 Grigg, Russell ​103
“The Effectiveness of Symbols” (Lévi-Strauss) ​96 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo ​85
ego: ​anatomical analogy for 95; body-image as Guattari, Félix ​19, 42–47, 49, 51–53
basis of 20, 92–96, 103, 148; body without organs
and 45; continuity of 99–100; definition of 20, Halbrooks, John ​20–21, 105
94; development of 92–94, 118; dual orientation Hall, James ​116
of 101–103; as external shield 101–103; Foucault's Hardt, Michael ​134
understanding of 20; Freud's understanding of 92– Hasegawa, Yuko ​174n19
95, 101–103; as function 20, 92–93, 98–100, 102–103; Der Heilige Christophorus I (1938)–VI (1944) (Dix) ​87
history of 93–94; id and 101–103; identification and Heraklides Ponticus ​18
20, 48, 49, 103, 119; imagination and 95–99; imago heterotopias ​15–16
and 101; Lacan's understanding of 92–95, 99–103, The Historical Novel (Lukács) ​108
118–119, 148–149; mirror stage and 92–94, 100, 103, The History of Sexuality (Foucault): ​volume one 13, 15,
119; narcissism and 148; pleasure principle and 102; 17, 38–39, 58, 81, 105, 107; volume two 13–14, 107
as projection 94–95; psychoanalysis and 93–94; HMS Surprise (O'Brian) ​108, 110, 113
reality principle and 102; as self 94; selfies and 21, Horsley, Michael ​120
118–119; sinthôme and 148–149; as symptom 118; How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Roussel) ​160
unification through 92–93, 101, 102 Hugo, Victor ​5–6
The Ego and the Id (Freud) ​94–95, 101 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Hugo) ​6
Eliot, T.S. ​3 hunchbacks: ​art and 80, 83–84; biopolitics and
Elliott, Carl ​3, 6, 9, 11 20, 80–83, 89–90; biopower and 20, 80–83,
The Empty Fortress (Bettelheim) ​52 86–90; bipedalism contrasted with 81–82; body in
Enforcing Normalcy (Davis) ​68–69, 78n4 modernity, as paradigm of 80–86, 90; civilizing
erotogenic body ​44–45, 47–48, 54n7 process and 82, 86; colonialism and 85–86; death
essentialism ​6, 9 and 88–89; fragmented bodies and 83–84; Freud's
existentialism ​97, 117, 122 thought and 82; identity and 85–86; Muselmann and
Experimental School of Bonneuil-Sur-Marne ​52–53 82–83, 89; Nazism and 82–83, 88–90; normativity
and 80–83, 85–86; olfactory drive and 82; overview
father ​8, 10–11, 73, 75–77, 101 of 20, 80; representation of 80–90; resistance and 20,
Faubion, James ​167–168 80; sexuality and 82; violence and 80, 83–86, 90; war
fetishism ​10, 25, 117 and 86–87
Fink, Bruce ​9–10, 22n8, 76
Finnegans Wake (Joyce) ​144 identification: ​dialectic and 4; ego and 20, 48, 49, 92,
Foucault, Michel: ​body and 13, 18, 20, 160; ego and 103, 119; imagination and 98–99; imago and 101;
20; knowledge and 14–16; Lacan's thought and 1, mirror stage and 11, 44–45, 72; Other and 116; selfies
4–5; language and 160, 167; masturbation and 13–15; and 115–116, 121
metamorphosis and 168, 172–173; posthumanism identity: ​apotemnophilia and 6–7, 12; clinical gaze and
and 168–169, 171–172; power and 13–17, 38, 108, 124– 35–36; disabled body and 70, 78; ego and 99, 101–103;
127, 136; quotes by 12–13, 105; on Roussel 151–152, hunchbacks and 85–86; sinthôme and 64; soma-
160–161, 166–168, 171–172; social control and 124, ethics and 58–59
126–127; soma-ethics and 57–60; subjectivity and The Imaginary (Sartre) ​96–97
4–5, 14–15, 17–18, 22n9, 105, 173 imagination: ​autonomy and 8; castration and 75; ego
fragmentation ​7, 12, 44, 69–70, 72–73, 80, 82–83, 120, and 95–99; identification and 98–99; knowledge and
122 97; Lacan's understanding of 96–97, 98–99; mirror
Frankenstein (Shelley) ​9, 69, 71–73 stage and 96, 98–99; perception and 97–98; poverty
freedom ​4–5, 31, 127, 132, 136 of the image and 99; received understanding of 97–
French Revolution ​80, 83 99; Sartre's understanding of 96–99, 101; symbolic
Freud, Sigmund: ​autonomy and 22n4; body according order and 98–99
to 8, 22n4; castration and 10, 75–76; drives and The Imagination (Sartre) ​96
19, 27–29; ego and 92–95, 101–103; fetishism and imago ​7, 70–72, 76–78, 93, 100–102
10; hunchbacks and 82; hysteria and 8; Lacan's re- imperfect body ​59
reading of 10; language and 44; olfactory drive and incompleteness ​10–11, 28, 69, 146
25–27; perversion and 11–12, 46; psychosis and 46; International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) ​9,
quotes by 6 22n7
“Function and Field of Speech and Language” (Lacan) ​ The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) ​25
8
Future Attribute Screen Technology (DHS) ​134 James, William ​95–97, 99–101, 103
Jay, Martin ​37, 40
Galioto, Erica D. ​21, 140 jouissance: ​autistic body and 47–48, 50, 54n7; as
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie ​72, 78n2 bodily expression of the real 60; body without
Gawande, Atul ​36 organs and 45; castration and 10, 76; desires and 46;
Geek Love (Dunn) ​7 drives and 32; language and 44, 60; mirror stage and
Geldhof, Abe ​64 73; Other and 142; overview of 19; painful pleasure
182  Index

of 142–143; psychoanalysis and 63; resistance and depiction of 2; Foucault's thought and 4–5; masks in
19, 60; self-destructive body and 57, 59–63, 65–66; 4–5; meaning of 3–4; subjectivity in 4–5
selfies and 122; soma-ethics and 65 Maleval, Jean-Claude ​47, 50–51, 54n5
Joyce, James ​143–149 Mannoni, Maud ​63
Jung, Carl ​89 Marx, Karl ​100–101
masochism ​42, 46
knowledge: ​clinical gaze and 38–40; corpses and Massey, Lyle ​41n5
38–41; death and 39–40; docile body and 15; masturbation: ​anti-masturbation movement
Foucault's understanding of 14–16; imagination and 13–15; body and 14–15; desires and 15; Foucault's
97; masturbation and 13–15; mirror stage and 57–58; understanding of 13–15; knowledge and 13–15;
self-knowledge and 57–58; soma-ethics and 57–58; male mutual masturbation 13, 17; as nonrelational
specialist form of 39; subjectivity and 17; subjugated sexuality 13–14; pathologization of 13–14; power and
knowledges 16 13–15, 17; subjectivity and 14–15; surveillance and 17
Kreuztragung (Dix) ​87 Mbembe, Achille ​125–126, 132, 135, 136n5
Kristeva, Julia ​38, 40 McLaughlin, Becky R. ​1, 5, 18
medical power ​19–20, 34, 114
Lacan, Jacques: ​apotemnophilia and 7–8, 10–11; autistic Menaker, Daniel ​117
body and 19, 52–53; autonomy and 8; body and metamorphosis: ​art and 151–152; athletic training
6–8, 54n1, 57, 140, 142, 148; body without organs as 165–166; body and 171; discipline and 151–152,
and 42–44, 46–47, 52–53; castration and 20, 75–76; 159–166; doubling as 166–168; Foucault's thought
death and 28; desires and 46, 121; disabled body and 168, 172–173; language and 160, 168; nonlinearity
and 20, 68–69, 71, 73, 75, 78; drives and 27–29, of 164, 174n10; Other and 171; overview of 21–22;
32, 60; ego and 92–95, 99–103, 118–119, 148–149; posthumanism and 21–22, 167–173; power and
Foucault's thought and 1, 4–5; Freud, rereading of 10; 151–152, 159–166; resistance and 173; subjectivity and
imagination and 96–97, 98–99; language and 5, 8, 28, 171, 173
44, 54n1; olfactory drive and 27; Other and 57, 121; The Method (Zeh) ​56, 63
perversion and 10, 46; power, lack of viable theory mirror stage: ​apotemnophilia and 11; body-image
of 59; psychoanalysis and 7–8, 20, 52, 63; psychosis and 44–45, 48–49, 57, 77, 100–101; body without
and 46, 77–78; quotes by 92, 115; resistance, lack of organs and 44–45; desires and 73; developmental
theory of 59, 61; self-destructive body and 59–61, 63, importance of 45, 69–70, 73, 101, 118–119; disabled
65; selfies and 118–119, 121–122; soma-ethics and 57, body and 20, 68–70, 73; ego and 92–94, 100, 103,
60; subjectivity and 4–5, 22n4, 28, 46, 54n3, 118–119; 119; fragmentation and 69–70; identification and
treatment based on thought of 19, 52–53 11, 44–45, 72; imagination and 96, 98–99; imago
Lagache, Daniel ​96 and 100–101; importance of 57, 69; jouissance
language: ​apotemnophilia and 8; autistic body and and 73; knowledge and 57–58; language and 44,
47; body and 8–10, 44, 46, 54n1, 74, 143–145; body 73; narcissism and 72–73; normativity and 11;
language 13, 16; body without organs and 44, 46–47; objectification through 118; objet petit a and 118–119;
clinical gaze and 37; desires and 46; disabled body Other and 57, 77, 118; perversion and 11; precursors
and 20, 69; drives and 28; Foucault's understanding of to 100; psychosis and 76; selfies and 21, 118–119, 121–
160, 167; Freud's understanding of 44; jouissance and 122; symbolic order and 73, 119; under-theorization
44, 60; Lacan's understanding of 5, 8, 28, 44, 54n1; of 92
metamorphosis and 160, 168; mirror stage and 44, 73; “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan) ​57, 96, 99, 102
olfactory drive and 27; order and 44, 74; Other and Mitchell, W.J.T. ​125–126
143; power and 160; self-reference and 160, 167; selfies Money, John ​6
and 117–118; sign language and 70, 73–74; symbolic Moshfegh, Ottessa ​21, 140, 143–145, 147, 150
signification and 60, 73–74, 76, 120, 142–146, 148 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Moshfegh): ​alienation
The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and in 142; art world in 147; body in 21, 140–144, 146–147,
Pontalis) ​100 149–150; desires in 149; extimacy in 142; femininity
Laub, Dori ​120 in 142–143; identification in 145–146, 150; jouissance
Laurent, Éric ​47–48, 50 in 142; language in 146, 148–149; narcissism in 148;
Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Salomon) ​80, Other in 21, 142–143, 149–150; overview of 21, 140–
88–89 141; sinthôme in 140–150; sleep as escape in 142–149;
Lefort, Robert ​48, 52, 54n6 subjectivity in 142, 147, 149–150; symbolic order in
Lefort, Rosine ​48, 52, 54n6 144–145; symptoms in 140–145, 149–150
Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugenie ​7
liberation ​7, 15, 34 narcissism ​4, 26, 32, 72–73, 102, 116–117, 119, 148
Lilja, Mona ​124 National Security Agency (NSA) ​128, 134
Linton, Simi ​70–71 Le Naufragé (Géricault) ​84–85
The Little Colonel (1935) ​74 Nazism ​80, 82–83, 86–89
Loadenthal, Michael ​21, 124 Neanderthals ​81–82, 90n2
Locus Solus (Roussel) ​160, 166, 168 Nebreda, David ​64
Loeb, Elizabeth ​9 Negri, Antonio ​134
The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) ​42 Neill, Calum ​19, 25
Luhmann, Niklas ​173–174n5 Nelson, Maggie ​60
Lupton, Deborah ​36 neoliberalism ​21
neurosis ​8, 10–11, 46, 53, 96, 118
Maimed and Anonymous (McLaughlin): ​ “The Neurotic's Individual Myth” (Lacan) ​96
apotemnophilia and 6; body in 3–4; creation of 1, 3; New Impressions of Africa (Roussel) ​160–161
 Index  183

New York Jacks (club): ​Foucault's thought and 108; power and 108–109; self-analysis in 107, 112;
13–18; as heterotopia 15–16; knowledge and 16–17; subjectivity in 105–107
normativity contested by 16; overview of 15; as posthumanism: ​anthropocentrism and 152, 168, 171,
panegyris 18; power and 16–17; respect in 15; rules for 174n16, 174n19; definition of 174n16; Foucault's
16; subjectivity and 17; surveillance and 16–17 thought and 168–169, 171–172; human nature and
Newham, Paul ​89 21–22, 169; metamorphosis and 21–22, 167–173;
Next Generation Identifications database (FBI) ​132 sources of 152
Nishiin Maru (ship) ​163, 170 power: ​biopolitics, transformation into 80; clinical
Nochlin, Linda ​83 gaze and 19, 34–41; corpses and 19, 38–40; death
normativity: ​apotemnophilia and 7–9, 11–12; autistic and 34, 37–41; definition of 17; desires and 17;
body and 19; biopolitics and 83; biopower and 81; disciplinary power 40, 82, 124–127, 134; docile body
body, normalization of the 80–83, 85–86; desires and and 15, 65; Foucault's understanding of 13–17, 38,
8; disabled body and 68–69; hunchbacks and 80–83, 108, 124–127, 136; Lacan's lack of viable theory of
85–86; mirror stage and 11; normalcy, hegemony 59; language and 160; masturbation and 13–15, 17;
of 70, 78n4; normalizing gaze 129–131; normative medical power 19–20, 34, 114; metamorphosis and
subject 7–9, 11–12; social media and 129–131; 151–152, 159–166; power dynamics 35; the real and
violence and 20, 83, 90 66; resistance and 15–16, 37–38, 59; self-destructive
body and 61–62, 66; self-policing and 126; selfies
objet petit a ​29, 46, 50, 118–119 and 21; social control and 124–130, 134; social media
O'Brian, Patrick: ​genealogy and 107; quotes by 105; and 21, 135; soma-ethics and 58–59; sovereign power
subjectivity and 106–107, 110, 113–114; writing 20, 80–82, 124–127, 134, 136n1; structures of 35;
approach of 108, 110, 112; see also specific works subjectivity and 58; surveillance and 125; see also
Oki, Michiko ​20, 80 biopower
olfactory drive: ​agency and 26; as civilizing force Powers of Horror (Kristeva) ​38, 40
19, 25–26; death and 26, 32; fetishism and 25; Prager Straße (Dix) ​86
Freud's understanding of 25–27; function of 25–26; psychiatry ​9, 14, 19, 62–63, 66
hunchbacks and 82; Lacan's understanding of psychoanalysis: ​apotemnophilia and 8–11; autistic
27; language and 27; libido and 25–26; liminality body and 48; body and 7, 142; body without organs
of 27; olfactory supremacy 26, 32; overview of and 42–43; disabled body and 69; ego and 93–94;
19; pheromones and 26; psychologization of 26; imago and 7; importance of 63; jouissance and
research on 26; trauma and 25; unconscious and 26; 63; Lacan's understanding of 7–8, 20, 52, 63; self-
under-theorized status of 25 destructive body and 63; subjectivity and 46; see also
Olympia (1938) ​82 specific psychoanalytic concepts
“On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalysts’s Desire” psychosis: ​body without organs and 46–47; castration
(Lacan) ​27 and 75–76, 78; foreclosure and 77; Freud's
Orlan (artist) ​7 understanding of 46; Lacan's understanding of 46,
Other: ​autistic body and 47–48, 54n6; Big Others 77–78; manifestations of 78; mirror stage and 76;
22n8, 142; body without organs and 45, 47; origins of 77; Other and 47; perversion and 54n4
desires and 116–121; identification and 116; public sex parties ​15–16
incomprehensibility of 57; jouissance and 142; The Punitive Society (Foucault) ​15–16
Lacan's understanding of 57, 121; language and 143; Punter, David ​12
little others 142; metamorphosis and 171; mirror
stage and 57, 77, 118; “other” contrasted with 116; Le Radeau de la Méduse (Géricault) ​84–85
perversion and 10, 47; psychosis and 47; self- the real ​57–58, 60–61, 66, 68
destructive body and 65; selfies and 21, 115–118, 120, reality principle ​102
122; soma-ethics and 58; subjectivity and 116–119; repression ​10, 19, 25, 70, 82, 92, 124, 141
symbolic order and 116, 142; unconscious and 116 resistance: ​art and 21; clinical gaze and 36–38; corpses
and 38–39; death and 36–38; disabled body and
panopticon ​18, 131, 134, 136 19–20; hunchbacks and 20, 80; jouissance and 19,
Penley, Constance ​116 60; Lacan's lack of theory on 59, 61; metamorphosis
Perfume (Süskind): ​death in 32; Lacan's thought and and 173; overview of 19; power and 15–16, 37–38, 59;
30–32; language in 29–30, 32n1; olfactory drive in 19, the real and 60–61; self-destructive body and 57–66;
25, 29–32; overview of 19, 25, 29–31 social media and 135–136; soma-ethics and 59, 63–65
perversion: ​alienation and 10; apotemnophilia and Revel, Judith ​18
10–12; body without organs and 46–47; Freud's Rose, Nikolas ​39, 56
understanding of 11–12, 46; Lacan's understanding Ross, Andrew ​116
of 10, 46; mirror stage and 11; moral dimensions of Roussel, Raymond: ​Foucault's writing on 151–152,
11–12; “normal” sexuality and 11–12; Other and 10, 160–161, 166–168, 171–172; language and 160–161;
47; pathology of 11–12; psychosis and 54n4 metamorphosis and 21, 152, 168–169, 171–172, 174n17;
Philo, Chris ​38 overview of 160; posthumanism and 152, 168, 169;
photography. See selfies self-reference and 160; writing method of 160–161,
pleasure principle ​46, 52, 73, 102 166, 174n7, 174n9
“The Position of the Unconscious” (Lacan) ​28
Post Captain (O'Brian): ​Cartesian mind/body in Salomon, Charlotte ​20, 80, 83, 88–90
105, 107–108, 110, 114; characterization in 106–107, Salvation Army (TaIa) ​13, 15
109–114; confession in 106, 109–110; diary in 105–106, Sartre, Jean Paul ​96–99, 101, 103
110; docile bodies and 108–109; Foucault's thought Scheidemann, Christian ​162–163
and 107–109; as genealogy 107; as historical novel schizophrenia ​42, 46, 64
184  Index

Schneier, Bruce ​127, 133 overview of 21; power and 21, 135; protests and 128–
self-destructive body: ​authentic body and 61; as 129; public spaces and 132–133; resistance and 135–136;
black mirror 19, 56, 58, 64–66; case study of 64–65; scope of 128; social control and 127–130; social
definition of 56; Foucault's thought and 58–60, 63; necessity of 135; Social Network Analysis and 130–131,
imperfect body and 59; increased prevalence of 62; 136; surveillance and 128–135; top sites for 128
jouissance and 57, 59–63, 65–66; Lacan's thought Social Network Analysis (SNA) ​130–131, 136
and 59–61, 63, 65; as more than mere pathology “Society Must Be Defended” (Foucault) ​16
63; Other and 65; overview of 19; pathologization Socrates ​93
of 19; power and 61–62, 66; pro–Ana groups and soma-ethics: ​biopower and 58; clinical practice
59; psychoanalysis and 63; the real and 60–61, 63; and 62–66; definition of 56; Foucault's thought
resistance and 57–66; self-harmers and 59; soma- and 57–60; identity and 58–59; jouissance and 65;
ethics and 19, 56–66; treatment of 62–66 knowledge and 57–58; Lacan's thought and 57, 60;
selfies: ​criticism of 116–117; desires and 117–120; ego limits of 61, 65; necessity of 57; operation of 58;
and 21, 118–119; history of 116; hyperreality and 121; Other and 58; overview of 57–58; power and 58–59;
identification and 115–116, 121; jouissance and 122; the real and 57–58, 61–62, 65; resistance and 59,
“killfies” and 116–117; Lacan's thought and 118–119, 63–65; self-destructive body and 19, 56–66
121–122; as lack in being and 120, 122; language “Some Reflections on the Ego” (Lacan) ​92, 102
and 117–118; mirror stage and 21, 118–119, 121–122; sovereign power ​20, 80–82, 124–127, 134, 136n1
narcissism and 116–117; objet petit a and 118–119; Spector, Nancy ​174n12
Other and 21, 115–118, 120, 122; overview of 21, 115– Studies in Hysteria (Freud) ​25
117; power and 21; as re-enactment 118–119, 121–122; “The Subject and Power” (Foucault) ​17
self-objectification through 115–120; semiocapitalism subjectivity: ​apotemnophilia and 6–9, 11; autistic body
and 116–117, 120–122; sinthôme and 121–122; and 19, 47; autonomy and 171; barred subject 28, 118;
subjectivity and 115; symbolic order and 120–122; as clinical gaze and 35; decentering of 173; disabled
symptom 115, 121; technoculture and 116–117 body and 68; drives and 28; as a form 4–5; Foucault's
Seminar (Lacan): ​II 93; V 100; XI 27; XIV 118; XIX 98; understanding of 4–5, 14–15, 17–18, 22n9, 105,
XX 142, 143; XXIII 140, 143 173; freedom and 4–5; knowledge and 17; Lacan's
semiocapitalism ​117, 120–122 understanding of 4–5, 22n4, 28, 46, 54n3, 118–119;
sexuality ​6, 9, 11–13, 15, 28, 44, 76, 82, 89 masturbation and 14–15; metamorphosis and 171,
shadow (concept) ​89 173; modern subject and 105, 107, 113; normative
the shadow ​89 subject 7–9, 11–12; Other and 116–119; power and 58;
Shakespeare, Tom ​74–75 psychoanalysis and 46; selfies and 115; sinthôme and
The Shape of Water (2017): ​albeism questioned by 78; 150; subjectivation and 14–15, 17–18, 22n9, 173
awards won by 69; body in 20, 69; castrated body Subjectivity and Truth (Foucault) ​18
in 74–78; disabled body in 68–74; ending of 74; “Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire”
impairment in 75; importance of 69, 78; jouissance (Lacan) ​8, 10
and 76; Lacan's thought and 68–70, 75, 78; language surveillance: ​biopolitics and 128, 132, 135–136;
and 69, 73, 77, 78n3; media influence of 20; mirror bio-surveillance 124, 132–136; inevitability of
stage and 72–74, 77; normalcy disrupted in 68–71, 131; masturbation and 17; power and 125; self-
74, 78; opening of 68; Other and 77; overview of 20, disciplining and 127; social control and 125, 127–134;
68; psychosis in 77; the real and 68; subjectivity in social media and 128–135; technology used for
68; symbolic order and 68, 73–77 132–134
Shapiro, Johanna ​35–36, 39 symbolic order: ​art and 90; autistic body and 19,
Siebers, Tobin ​74 46–50; body and 28; body without organs and
signification ​60, 73–74, 76, 120, 142–146, 148 44–45; castration and 75–77; disabled body and 78;
sinthôme: ​body and 140, 146, 149; central features imagination and 98–99; language and 44, 74; mirror
of 146–147; definition of 143; desires and 149; ego stage and 73, 119; Other and 116, 142; selfies and
and 148–149; identity and 64; Joyce and 143–144, 120–122
146–149; selfies and 121–122; subjectivity and 150; Symposium (Plato) ​28
symptom transition into 5, 64, 140, 143–145, 147,
149–150 Television (Lacan) ​8
“The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Tercier, John ​34
Psychoanalysts in 1956” (Lacan) ​27 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) ​42, 46,
social body ​35, 38, 125 51, 53
social constructivism ​6, 69, 74–75, 78 Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud) ​11, 25, 27
social control: ​biopolitics and 125; bio-surveillance To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Artaud) ​42
and 124, 132–134; docile body and 128; Foucault's totality ​7–8, 83
understanding of 124, 126–127; genealogy and 124– Transexualis (Barney) ​165
127; modalities of 126–127; political dissenters and transformation ​ see ​
metamorphosis
134; power and 124–130, 134; protests and 128–129; Triumph des Todes (Dix) ​86–87
requirements for 130; self-policing and 126–127; Triumph of the Will (1934) ​82
social media and 127–130; surveillance and 125, Twain, Mark ​6
127–134; technology used for 125, 132–136; violence
and 124–125, 127, 134 Ulysses (Joyce) ​144
social media: ​autonomy and 129; biopolitics and uncanny ​6–8, 10, 29, 83, 117, 122
135–136; bio-surveillance and 132–136; body and unconscious ​10, 12, 25–26, 28, 36–37, 100, 116–121, 141,
128; docile body and 128; freedom and 136; networks 144–145
examined through 129–131; normativity and 129–131; The Use of Pleasure (Foucault) ​13–14
 Index  185

Vanderwees, Chris ​21, 115 The Wine Dark Sea (O'Brian) ​110

Vanheule, Stijn ​60, 64 Wolfe, Cary ​152, 168, 174n16
Verbeke, Evi ​19–20, 56 Wolfsohn, Alfred ​88–89
Villa Voortman (community center) ​63 World War I ​83, 86, 89
Vinthagen, Stellan ​124
violence: ​art and 90; biopolitics and 80, 83, 90; Zeh, Juli ​56, 63
biopower and 20, 80–81, 90; hunchbacks and 80, Žižek, Slavoj ​5, 120, 150
83–86, 90; normativity and 20, 83, 90; social control Zupančič, Alenka ​27, 32
and 124–125, 127, 134
Vogt, Erik ​83