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Solar Clitoris
Sue Golding
Published online: 30 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Sue Golding (1997) Solar Clitoris, Parallax, 3:1, 137-149, DOI:
10.1080/13534645.1997.9522380

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 Solar Clitoris

Sue G o l d i n g

[Prefatory.]

I hope you will indulge me today: the original title for the paper was to be: "The
Lust, The Body, and T h e Elsewhere" - but to be honest, I found this so utterly
erstwhile and academically prudent (irrespective of the word 'lust') - what would
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have followed would have conceivably been (more or less) a version of what Bataille
so non-chalantly tossed off as 'intellectual bloodstaining': the rather boring mania to
explain everything by sucking the very life blood out of it, usually in low, dull,
monochromatic tones; t's crossed, i's dotted.

Some say Bataille went too far with this kind of reasoned seemingly anti-intellectual
attack against reason - for example when, along with Artaud, the manifesto-styled
cry "we must make philosophy shit!" - landed them the not so surprising (though
coming from André Breton, maybe slighdy surprising) retort along the lines of:

M. Bataille professes/ to wish/ to consider/ in the world/ that which

is vilest, most discouraging and most corrupted... Hence it is to be
noted that M. Bataille misuses adjectives with a passion: befouled,
senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering... Antonin Artaud and [Georges]
Bataille are nothing better than 'excrement-philosophers; ie, full of
shit."

But, I don't think Bataille (or for that matter, Artaud) went too far. Indeed, I don't
think they went far enough.

So I changed the tide.

parallax 4 (febroory 1997): 137-150

 Solar Clitoris

The eating of one species by another is the simplest

form of luxury.

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share s

[Oratory.]

Beginnings are never innocent, says Bataille.

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In 1679, a seemingly inauspicious year to start our discussion, the Habeas Corpus Act
by Charles II - now one of the most basic rights of a modern democratic state - was
encoded into the legal system. Literally meaning "Thou shalt have the b o d / ' , 4 it
made illegal the (up to that point usual) practice of charging, finding guilty/sentencing
a person without that person possibly even knowing they had been accused, let
alone permitted to be (and in many cases prevented from being) physically present
before a judge or court. In theory, the law changed all that; though, as we know, not
always if one's skin were coloured, one's genitalia wrong or multiple, one's class not
quite up to scratch. Indeed, it could easily be suggested diat its evil (non-identical)
twin, the Kafka-esque moment of standing tiny, tiny before die Law, always-already
found guilty of a crime that never quite happened (except that it did), is the modern
version of that relendess time, that time without body, the corpseless time of smoke
and mirror, mocking by way of reflection and trial, the very core of identity, of our
identities, not to mention, of our social environ itself.

It should not be surprising, then, that with Bataille's erotic philosophic prose, we
find a radically democratic shift that puts die corpus back into habeas without
quiver or qualm. Two things become central for our purposes today: (i) this excrement,
this 'excessiveness' of die body forces an abstract desire off the agenda, replacing the
abstractions with a kind of distopic etiiicality, fractured and bleeding, yet multiple
and alive; whereby die dialectics of negation are exchanged for a multiple singularity;
a transcendence or immanence replaced by die irreducible nudity of a half-clothed
skin, whose obsessive beckoning - dare we say 'seduction' - calls to us, says Bataille,
makes us move, betrays our dissolute whims. 5 Hence, point (ii) the sacred and the
profane cling togedier, no longer opposed in simple contradiction - or indeed in any
contradiction - but, instead, paradoxically linked, strangely united against die tedium
of mediocrity. "He dropped die swine," Story of the Eye intones,

and he crashed to the floor. Sir Edmond, Simone, and myself were
coldly animated by die same determination, together with an incredible
excitement and levity. The priest lay there with a limp cock, his teeth
digging into die floor with rage and shame. Now that his balls were
 drained, his abomination appeared to him in all its horror. He audibly
sighed:

' O h miserable sacrileges...'

And other incomprehensible laments...

[...] 'First I am going to tell you a story,' Sir Edmond said to him
sedately. 'You know that men who are hanged or garrotted have such
stiff cocks the instant dieir respiration is cut off that they ejaculate.
You are going to have the pleasure of being martyred while fucking
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diis girl.

[...] 'Now,' continued Sir Edmond, 'squeeze his throat just behind the
Adam's apple: a strong, gradual pressure.'

Simone squeezed; a dreadful shudder ran dirough that mute, fully

immobilized body, and the cock stood on end. I took it into my hands
and had no trouble fitdng it into Simone's vulva, while she continued
to squeeze the throat.

The utterly intoxicated giri kept wrenching die big cock in and out
with her buttocks, atop a body whose muscles were cracking in our
formidable strangleholds.

At last, she squeezed so resolutely tiiat an even more violent dirill shot
dirough her victim, and she felt die come shooting inside her cunt.
Now she let go, collapsing backwards in a tempest of joy.

Simone lay on die floor, her belly up, her diigh still smeared by the
dead man's sperm which had trickled from her vulva. I stretched out
at her side to rape and fuck her in turn, but all I could do was squeeze
her in my arms and kiss her mouth because of a strange inward
paralysis ultimately caused by my love for the girl and die deatii of the
unspeakable creature. I have never been so content. 6

A brutal contentment; agonizing at the point of rupture, desacrilizing die marriage

vow, 'until death do us part'. And yet, at die same time, an odd kind of sacrilege
rearing its ugly head: one wholly inconsistent widi dialectical syndiesis; one wherein
a non-recuperable Law forms die edge or contours of meaning, an 'edge' which is
botii a kind of 'inside' and an 'outside', and, at die very same instant, uncategorizable
as eidier. For we have before us, with tiiese pornographic haemorrhages, a non-
representational, metonymic limit - the pratico-political or political philosophical
limit writ small, truncated, whilst simultaneously over extending itself.

parallax
 A peculiar form of a limit/a peculiar form of necessity taking shape - one that is
contingent and split, differentiated at its base; whereby this 'base' becomes the
erstwhile 'ground' of a plural and lacerated change; indeed, becomes the erstwhile
'ground' of the ethical. T h e profane becomes, says Bataille, the "immutable
backcloth" of the sacred, a sacred-profanity or profane-sacredness which, 'itself (as
an impossible 'itself') tracks the transition from security [stability] to risk.7 To put
this slightly differendy, change is no longer binarily split, 'duty-bound' to reflect (as
in other forms of identity, its positivity and contradiction); its resolution (or meaning)
no longer found soley through its dialectical synthesis. No longer, that is to say, forced
together in point-for-point tango of opposition, and dius no longer hooked to a
categorically imperative necessity or exiled to die immanence of a transcendental
ought to be. We have, instead die emergence of an 'Odier' which by its very 'essence'
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- and I use diis word 'essence' purposely - is no longer the (homogeneous) empty
container of die outside of thought, nor the outside of subjectivity nor the outside of
objectivity; nor for that matter, the 'outside' at all: not as woman, or as person of
colour or as oppressed and excluded; no longer, diat is to say, wandering Jew of
philosophic diought. Radier, it is the exuberandy excessive instant, a sickening sacred
present-tense instant of the nonpedigreed world. Bataille baptizes it: contagion and
reveres it as ethical. 8

And yet, for all his brilliant and sweaty moves to the contrary, die transgression
never quite catapults die law: the radical mastery of body pleasure passions (radical
and corrupt in every sense) never quite maintains a non-recuperable status. The
instant qua instant always already gets absorbed by the risk; die uroboric snake
manages, quite contentedly, to eat it's tail.

[Repository/suppository.]

'How can the eye see itself?' [Plato asks]. 'The answer
is apparently very simple, ' says Foucault, but in fact it
is very complicated. For Plato, one cannot simply look
at oneself in a mirror. One has to look into another eye,
that is, one in oneself, however in oneself in the shape
of the eye of the other.

Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of

Ethics"

For Foucault, in his "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress", 9
the dialectic is rejected out of hand and with that rejection, we begin to find clues for
a different articulation of ethics, and indeed, a different articulation of self-formation/
self-knowledge, one which is formed, of necessity, from an ' O t h e r relation, not quite
specified. Like Bataille, his does not emerge either from the supposed deep and
violent cut of an identity drawn from exile or negation. And yet. unlike Bataille, it is

Golding
140
 an otherness that will become a rather queer and superficial wound - a metamorphosis
of surface distances, whose 'other' meaning is constituted by recourse to a something
else or something other than contradiction - dialectic or otherwise. Like the gaping,
open mouth of a pig before slaughter (is she laughing out of ignorance; is she screaming
out of knowledge - maybe she is doing both, at exactly the same time),10 the perpetual
corruption of an edge or boundary that stands neither as an 'outside' nor as an 'in'
to any language-game, will now quiedy - and strategically - replace what was once
considered the absolute necessity of conceptualizing any identity, symbolic, real, or
imagined; to wit, the im-mediate ' / ' of the eidier/or.

And yet, this something else or something odier is not the sacred-profanity of a
trace, counterposed to the mediocrity of the every-day; indeed, it is not a
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'counterposition' at all. Nor is it merely the not-nameable representation standing

before, beyond or beside a continent limit of sovereignty or Law. Nor for that matter
is it 'difference', if, by difference, we mean to say 'not-the-same'. Nor, finally, is it
'lack', if by lack we mean an incommensurable 'empty space' waiting to be filled.
Apologies to Baudrillardians or Lacanians (and etc.) on this score, but this something
else or something other is not a trace or a lack at all; nor is it an abyss, a shame, an
embarrassment, an error, a negation, a castration, a sacramental rite, celebration or
void. For Foucault is not dealing with representation, as in identity, in any of its
symbolic order or symbolic disarray. Nor is he dealing with a representation around
which an x or y can be reproduced or deduced or induced, leaving, in its wake, a
remainder tout court.

Something much more excessive, or ungrateful and greasy, something much more
melancholic, subtle, and in some ways, more precarious, is nagging at the skin of our
so-called (and seemingly not comparable) fruit. Rather tJian the bold and sweeping
morass of contradiction (subjectivity v. objectivity - and the transcendentalism this
implies - be damned!), Foucault insists upon an 'other' as a 'something else', a bios,
whose porous-like creation or invention, whose mu/ft/iZe-singularity is itself contoured
by, while simultaneously contouring, the very processes (reciprocal, wandering,
mannered) of tradition, custom, habit."

To put this slightly differently, his is a strange kind of 'odierness' refusing the one-
to-one singularity/identity ratio of truth (meta-narrative or odierwise), wherein tlie
'other' comes to mean that which does not quite 'correspond' or 'fit in'. Indeed, diis
'otherness', like Bataille's is completely at odds widi one that might imply or mean a
'not-of-the-Something' - a 'positive negation' (one of Adorno's irritations at die
Hegelian left). Otherness, the other, etc. cannot be reduced to or be equated with or
seen as circumscribing die identity of 'diose who do not fit in': die (straight) woman,
die homosexual, the hermaphrodite, or all three. 12 Unlike die glib proclamation,
which in days (not yet) gone by announced, "Wake up, young people from your
illusory pleasures; strip off your disguises and recall that every one of you has a sex,
a true sex",13 tiiere is no 'true sex' nor its exiled relative, die 'odier'. There is simply
the 'strange history' of people who insists tiiat this is so.
 If that be the case - if, that is to say, it is not the 'outside' negation of a that-which-
lies-around-us - dien what constitutes Foucault's handling of 'other/excess'? In one
word, though many more will follow, it is techne, indeed, a peculiar re-invention of
die term, wherein techne becomes also the strategy of tedine; a strategy of compulsion
(as in: to compel); a strategy of style and manners (as in: to charm not without
pleasure and attention to detail, to have grace, savoirfaire); it is a strategy of use (as in
to handle and be handled; to utilize; to exercise, exhaust; to corrupt; to resist; to
invoke pleasure or pain or both). Indeed, it is a strategy of the 'being used'; a
strategy of seduction." For let there be no mistake about it, this otherness points to
a stylistics of existence, a 'being used', in the most profane and corrupting senses of
the phrase: lying to hand. And yet, we are rather far away from Bataille's 'seducdon'
as 'the irreducible nudity' of betrayal. Moreover, we are even farther from Heidegger's
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techne as transcendent "looking out beyond what is given at any urne" (and the
heterogeneous sense of time clipped out at die expense of 'space'). 15 And we are
furthermost from its Benthamite predecessor of pleasure/pain utility.16 For the
physicaliry of this terrain (if, indeed, there is a singularly dimensional terrain), its
'materiality' emerges out of, and by way of, the so-called 'in between' of the sdtched
togedier discourse, the fleedng in between of an infinitely beating strange-time called
'the present' (despite the fact this endre remark has been resdng on pre-die Christian
martyrdom). In philosophic prose, it is a mimedc re-presendng of the present around
which this something else or something odier is created by virtue of its being there (as
in: 'over there', 'over here' and the reladve webbings and weaves in between and
around that t/here) - to which our varied customs, manners and so on, permit us -
and indeed, demand of us - to make use.

That is to say, uhen, diat this 'odier' self/identity self becomes, simply, the expression
of multi-particled selfnesses, made meaningful, made into a something 'else' - a kind
of gaseous 'nodal point' of self - due precisely to its having been attracted/seduced,
and therewith, sutured, into a oneness (of sorts) not because of beauty (per se) or
desire (per se) or even magnetism (per se) but precisely because it can be - and must be
- used. Techne. Cohesive relations, processes, wanderings, traditions, fleedng nodal
points, dreams, even the sweat (or especially die sweat) of die body loins, are all grist
for die mill, all 'props' for establishing the multiple-as-a-singular-unity, establishing,
in other words, the that which lies around us, die elsewhere or otherness, as us, but
an 'us' as 'selfhood' quite distinct from the wholly-formed Truth of the Cartesian
ego-I, self-reflexive sense of self. "If A = A as an identity is reformulated as I = I
(Fichte)," concludes Joan Stambaugh in her introducdon to Heidegger's Identity and
Difference, "and by Schelling as 'more precisely the indifference of the subject to the
object'"," we can say that for Foucault, it is no more nor less than a path or field of
compressed/multiple [relative] relations informed, conformed, indeed reformed as
a kind of double headed arrow of I-selfs <-> I-selfs. Foucault puts it like this:
 In Epictetus there are 2 exercises: sophistic and ethical. T h e first
borrowed from school: question-and-answer games. [...] T h e second
are ambulatory exercises. In the morning you go for a walk and test
your reactions to that walk. T h e purpose of both exercises is control
of representations, not the deciphering of truth. They are reminders
about conforming to the rules in the face of adversity. [...] For Epictetus,
the control of representations means not deciphering but recalling
principles of acting and thus seeing, dirough self-examination, if tiiey
govern your life. It is a kind of permanent self-examinadon. [But in
die end] You have to beyour own censor.16
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This 'kind of permanent self-examinadon' and 'self-censorship' is what Foucault

short-hands as 'technologies of die self; ie. a 'logic of die techne', a logic of seducdons
(plural) of die self to die self which creates the necessary distance or padi for a conversio
ad se, a conversion of the selves into self as self.'8 In Foucault's preliminary and ancient
cartography of die self-to-self relation, diis distance gained or accumulated amounts
to (or circumscribes) nodiing other than die social and constitutive self in its fluid
fullness: where the other and its sometiiing come togedier to form a self-contained
self; a self wherein finally "one 'belongs to [onejself'," says Foucault, where "one is
'his own master'; one is answerable only to oneself, one is suijuris; one exercises over
oneself an authority diat nodiing limits or direatens; one holds die potestas sui."20 Indeed,
this technology of die self is but a discursive human geography, a kind of permeable
civil fortress of self-hoodedness/self-mastery diat not only emphasizes control in die
sense of establishing a peculiar masterliness of sorts that can defy limits or threats
without, at the same time, incubating in its wake die Hegelian predisposition of die
master/slave dialectic, but also emits of itself a specific ethics of control; die (ethical)
control of die perpetual self-creating/self-inventing self.

How different is diis from die cogito of a Western metaphysics! How different is die
fruit of diis 'odierness' from die more contemporary attempts to which we have not
only beared witness, but often assume!21

Witii diis different use of reason, we have before us as beheaded rational mastery of
self, a multiple personality order, controlling and controlled at die fleeting threshold
of pleasured self-uses - a metamorphosis, a conversio ad se, a kind of flight of
fancy nothing less dian 'ecstatic' - sans a teleologica! 'desire' or transcendental 'ought
to be'. 22 And yet, its transitory momentum belies an oddly stable, though distincdy
imaginative, mapping of the self, which, in this read, becomes both infinitely
changeable and rigidly concrete, circumscribing an impossible arena of both self-
possession (as in a juridical model of possession) and nomadic self-rule. For this is an
"ecstatic flight", as Bernauer casts it; a pleasure flight, which requires an entire
preparation linking body with soul without referent to the Western forms of
masterlines, in die name of die Father or of Desire or Lacuna or Law.23 One's time
becomes "full time"; indeed, becomes focused, disciplined, dirty/gritty time, with
 the Oracle at Delphi - 'know thyself - looming large. Indeed, in this multiple/
singularity of self, unified (if this be die word) by the peculiar seductive acts of the
'being used', tiiere is no space at all for the what will later be described by Nietzsche
as "toxic time", that is, the wasted, mediocre time, of the modern self-reflexive Being-
as-Time.

The desiring subject is dead.

And in its wake, the pleasure/using 'other' of self-related-self re-emerges, one whose
very relations invents/creates an ethics of pleasure, in the fullest sense of the phrase:
to cultivate pleasure, be it raw paint, transformative, melancholic, meditative,
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nomadic.

So it is that this fleeting relation of pleasure and its uses, this metamorphosis of self
to self, is captured by Foucault with the term 'stylistics of existence', an ecstatic flight
of invention - and seduction - which is no less than the ethico-political art of carving
out one's life, should one be willing to journey onto the surface of the risk. Its
metonymic rhythms, its poetic beat-beatings - repetitive, lyrical and distinct - have
no a priori moral agency, though its cohesive synthetics emit nothing short of an
ethical demand, an ethical demand made 'real' by virtue of its having been coagulated
into a multiple something, whatever this something - or for that matter, its multiplicity,
may be. A politics of 'making real' at the level of otherness, if ever there was one.

[pulp/theory.]/[pulp theory.]

#158. An inconvenient trait. - Tofindeverything

profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one
strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds
more than one might have wished.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Intellectual bloodstains. Let us be very careful not too strain too intently. Shall we,
instead just steal a small leaf from both Bataille's and Foucault's 'book', nodding to
die infinite quagmire of change and in attempting to do so, avoid the profound?
One step backward, two steps ahead: let's have some fun: why not try to link Bataille's
notion of 'risk' as the uroboric unity of the profanely sacred with Foucault's notion
of ecstatic flight. In the contemporary terms of today what we get is a type of odierness,
a queerer type of otherness, that displays itself as fetish, indeed, one could say, as
'ecstatic fetish' - the mad run-up to death, a kind of mourning without the
melancholia.
 For if one follows the general indications on the impossibility of homogeneous
otherness as outlined by Bataille and Foucault, we get a different read of the terrain.
Fetish itself becomes a far more delicate, though like silk, rather durable, construction.
Fetish becomes a far more raw (and explicit) bleed, though like blood, changes colour
the moment its presence surfaces to air. Fetish becomes a far more complicated joke
- some say a 'compacted story", funny and alive, though precisely and at the same
time, rather desperate and clinging, painful, stillborn, and even gut-wrenching. Laugh
till she cried. (And then cried for more?) Yes, why not?

For fetish, if it is anything at all, in at least being all these contradictory and mutadng
'doubles', is precisely and only die multiple singularity of itself.
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One could say it entails, inscribes and delimits a kind of ripped and shared
hermaphrodism (and I do not use this word lighdy) which is not a metaphor 'standing
in' for anything else. Neither is it an 'empty' container waidng to be filled by some
endless struggle between diis thing called, (for example) heterosexual desire, this
thing called homosexual desire, and this diing called bisexual desire mutated into
one pair of rubber stockings, one certain 60s hairstyle, one opened and smiling or
tortured mouth. The fetishizadon of these creatures: male, female, transgendered
beings, homo/lesbo/bisexed erotics, hairstyles and hose, cannot quite be reduced,
however microscopic, to some kind of impenetrable mass, stuck together and
'understood' only in terms of their opposition, contradiction or annihiladon.

For its synthesis, its moment, is not a 'something' that can be flung open and brought
to public light, public scrutiny or even public 'liberation'. // is far too vampiricfor all
that. The meaning of the fetish both disappears and hovers at the very instant it
seems most near to hand. There are neither trutiis nor secrets in a fetish; no discovery,
no bringing to the surface its authentic point of departure; indeed, no 'authentic'
point at all. This does not mean that it is meaningless; or that it describes no limit or
can be seen as an infinite regression.

Rather, it is to say that fetish is the surface and the departure and the arrival; it's
whole point is that it is a squished up line at the very moment of its being a dot (and/
or vice versa: an elongated dot cleverly doubled as a line); a process and an end-
point, endlessly processional and finitely punctuated; the very threshold of a
compacted story, a narrative diat could never become 'meta'; never become 'spectacle'
as such. Its presence, like all presents, is simply impossible (here, there, and gone at
the exact same instant); a virtual 'to be', a mastery of the coming of masterliness. A
radical master: being a perfecdy imperfect autonomous mastering, as de Sade would
say, one without submission to a fixed and totalized Other. It is rather a virtual mastery,
a radically impure mastery - de-sanitized over and again on the slippery slope between
and amongst the relation of self to self.
 An obsessional, virtual, metonymic surface. An unreal (but, on die odier hand, no
less real), floating, magical, pleasure seeking surface, shot through with the absurdity
of the cruel, of the dead, of the wronged. Isn't life funny!? Isn't life grand?! A
cyberspace of present tense passion, of perpetual movement going nowhere in
particular, but going there with speed and agility and attentiveness to detail,
nonetheless. Not a òecoming of self, not an immanence as such; not a telos unfolding
eidier to the known or unknown trudi of self-awareness self; not a Law because, by
definition, Law (and therewith, trudi). Simply a coming without the 'be'; a coming
widiout the identity relation of the 'to be'; a coming to die surface of the present
tense presence; superficiality in all its glory, re-making and re-presenMng the radical
plurality of self without recourse to die always already signed, sealed, and delivered
self-given self.
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For fetish is simply, if it is anything at all, history with a Pop, the singularly self-
identified-self, blown to smithereens, undone and redone in the sacred image of
mutated selves, cyber-selves; variegated selves of the re-thought-out selves, bent and
re-designed in die instant coming of its come, by self-immoladon self-exhibidonism,
self-abuse, all fitted neady into corset and collage. A mudlated series of selves (any
selves), a repetidve series of selves, well-rehearsed some might say (ritualised, most
would say) dirough the mirrored multiplicity of space in between (and amongst) die
snap-crackle-pop of leather, latex and lace self forming selves.

Transladon: No more 'inside' v. die 'outside' of individual body selves. No more self-
reflexive self. Otherness as a kind of marker, horizon, even a kind of 'skin' for the
politically, emotionally liberal-impaired self; nothing more and nothing less than die
infinite metamorphoses of die self into selves (or vice versa); the transformative
mutadons whose strange but somehow familiar (though utteriy unchartered) pluralities
meld into oddly coherent, albeit risky, wholes - holographic wholes - making
metamorphosis, and widi it, fetish, the very staff of identity itself. An identity which
is no more or less dian die excessive ecstatic flights of seduction in all its varying
'other' possibilities.

In die fetish worid: a world diat is not community and not geared toward a 'something'
(but is rather diat heterogeneous sense of coded regulations and conduct spoken of
earlier), we have before us then a peculiar imaginary of variegated impossibilities,
an oozing excessivity of die self no longer outside the very processes of change, and
therewith, no longer outside our grasp or reduced to a singular, opaque and
unblemished purity. Could it not be said, widiout overstating the case that we have
the possibility (or anyway, 'a' possibility) of routing out, if nothing else, a damning
fascist logic of the fixed whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth-so-help-us-god
morality. And in its place? A fleeting, mutinous, fetishized, politics of existence, a
peculiar form of ethics: social and multiple, mannered and refined, continuous in its
rupturing of the aesthetic form (though aesthetic nonetheless); a kind of political-
[aesthetic]-ethics whose integrity is graspable only at its multiple 'other' crossing.
 [note on the text.]

For Bataille, who stopped too short of this, the solar anus could only ever be "the
intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding [could]
be compared except the sun, even though", as he went on to say, "the anus is the
nighf'.2> No. It is the sacred, graspable only at its multiple 'other' crossing.

Notes

1
A n d r e B r e t o n , as q u o t e d by Allen Weiss, '-' Foucault is basically attacking the widespread
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"Between the Sign of the Scorpion and the Sign of
the Cross".
7 (either for progressive reasons or not) the concept
A portion of this article appeared in S. Golding,
"The Politics of Foucault's Poetics, or, Better Yet:
T h e Ethical Demand of Ecstatic Fetish", in New
Formations, Michel Foucault: J'Accuse 25 (Summer
1995): 40-47.
3 is 'the enemy' and so forth). Interestingly enough,
Georges Baiaille, "Laws of General Economy",
section: "The Three Luxuries of Nature: Eating,
Death and Sexual Reproduction", The Accursed
Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books,
1991 (1976)): 33.
' The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Based
on the Oxford English Dictionary and its Supplements, ed.
J. B. Sykes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 (6th
Edition)): 4 8 1 .
s
Georges Bataillc, "Happiness, Eroticism and
L i t e r a t u r e " , The Absence of Myth: Writings on
Surrealism, ed., t r a n s . , a n d i n t r o . , M i c h a e l
Richardson (London: Verso, 1994): 186-208; but
especially, 198-203.
6
Georges Bataille, "Chapter 13, T h e Legs of die
Fly", Story of the Eye (1928/1945) (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1987): 78, 79-81.
7 13
Georges Bataille, "War and the Philosophy of the
Sacred", in op. cil.,77* Absence of Myth, 113-22,
especially, 118-21.
8 Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books,
Ibid., Bataille, "War and the Philosophy of the
Sacred", 113.
5 14
Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics:
An Overview of Work in Progress", 77K Foucault
Reader, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 340-372.
10
The image of the gaping wound as smiling pig
as (morbid) metamorphosis was first brought to my
attention through the wonderfully unconventional
writings of Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature
and Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976).
' ' Op. cit., Foucault, " O n die Genealogy of Etfiics",
344-51.
but no less facile tendency of those political
philosophies which forward in one way or another
of those who 'do not fit in' (which include, also:
thejews, people of colour, travellers, etc.). In reality
those theories only take as a given exacdy what
they are trying to prove (around oppression, who
A d o r n o {Negative Dialectics ( N e w York: T h e
Continuum Publishing Co., 1966)) makes a similar
point in his " C r i t i q u e of Positive N e g a t i o n " ,
though, unlike Foucault, Adorno tries to rescue the
negative form a hegelian positivity a n d poorly
understood freudianism, wherein for example,
' w o m a n ' , b e c o m e s ' o t h e r ' , a n d , in m o r e
c o n t e m p o r a r y times, as the female 'castrated'
container (as it were) always-already pitted against
and subsumed in terms of the 'phallic-male' real.
"Against this", says Adorno, "the seriousness of
unswerving negation lies in its refusal to lend itself
to sanctioning things as dicy are" (Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, 159). [My e m p h a s i s ] . See also my
"Curiosity", (Sue Golding, "Curiosity", AngelaJd
( 1995)), where this point is detailed more extensively.
Michel Foucault, Herculme Barbin: Being the Recently
Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French
Hermaphrodite, intro., Michel Foucault, trans.
1980).
This point will be played out in greater detail
momentarily. But see in particular Foucault's, "Why
the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, But
W h a t We C a n Learn From It Anyway", " T h e
Structure of Genealogical Interpretation", and
"From the Classical Self to the M o d e r n Subject"
(all in op. cit., Foucault, " O n the Genealogy of
Ethics", esp 348-51; 353-58; 361-68, respectively)
a n d " T h e Cultivation of T h e Self", "Self and
Others", "The Body" (Michel Foucault, The Care
of the Self: The History of Sexuality, voi 3, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988): p a n s II,
 Ill and IV).
15
From M a r t i n H e i d e g g e r ' s An Introduction to
Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York:
Doubleday, 1961 ) as quoted in Christopher Fynsk
{Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1993 (expanded
edition)): 120). Fynsk, in succincdy extrapolating
upon Heidegger's use of techne, clearly maps out
the way in which that usage leads squarely back to
the negation . the disaster, the error, the wronged,
and so on. H e writes, in part: "'Techne' Heidegger
defines as 'knowledge': the transcendent 'looking
out beyond what is given at any time, by which the
Being of what is is disclosed and realized - opened
and held open - in the work as a being. Techne,
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Heidegger says, provides the basic trait of demon in
the sense of 'the violent'... Man is demon in that he
moves in t h e violent action of ' m a c h i n a t i o n '
(mechanoen) that Heidegger defines in terms of
techne, but m a n is the strangest or most uncanny
(to denotation), in that in his opening of paths in
all the realms of being, he is constandy 'issueless':
'he becomes the strangest of all beings because,
without issue on all paths he is cast out of every
relation to the familiar and befallen by ate, ruin,
catastrophe.' ...Man is 'without issue on all paths'
because his violent and venturesome way-making
must shatter against death, 'this strange a n d
uncanny thing that banishes us once and for all
from everything in which we are at home.*... As
m a n ventures to m a s t e r b e i n g in techne, he
constantly stands before the possibility of death.
To stand before death is fundamentally to stand in
t h e possibility of disaster - downfall into the
placeless and issueless, the event of Umheimlichkeit
itself. ...Disaster, then, is not only possible, it is
necessary. M a n is driven to assume his essence as
Dasein in techne by Being that requires a place of
disclosure."
16
O f course, as is well-known from Bentham's
Principles ofMorals and Legislation ((Buffalo, New York:
Prometheus Books, 1988): see chapters III-V)
Bentham's utilitarianism, and die notions of 'use'
a n d 'usefulness' that stem from this, operates by
wav of a zero-sum game of pleasure and pain, or,
what he calls the aggression/resistance principle
of physics. This presupposes, amongst other things,
a fully formed cogito, and a self-reflexive self, whose
self-hoodedness (self-mastery of the becoming of
self) is b a s e d on t h e c o n c e p t t h a t b e i n g is
intrinsically 'good'. But to accept this, is also then
to take as a given that reality is precisely - and only
- the reality of each individual per sc. At the end of
the day, this would mean, finally, that 'use' a n d / o r
'discovery' (techne) would encompass the
(individual) desire of her or his own pleasure for its
own sake. O r to put this slighdy differently, it would
be to accept t h a t , as t h e h u m a n a n i m a l is
intrinsically benevolent, yet this benevolence only
exists to the degree to which whatever we may do
(for or to each other), we would do it to advance
ourselves first and foremost: the 'use' of a thing
would be j u d g e d accordingly. Foucault is not
invoking or even hinting at this type of 'use'.
" Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans, and
intro. J o a n Stambaugh (New York: Harper and
Row, 1969): 9.
18
Foucault quoted in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Covernmentality, with two lectures and an interview by
Michel Foucault, eds. G r a h a m Burchell, Colin
Gordon and Peter Miller (Hertfordshire: Harvester
VVheatsheaf, 1988): 38.
" Op. cit., Foucault, The Care of the Self, 65fT. In
Pan Two " T h e Cultivation of the Self", he writes,
"...one had best keep in m i n d that the chief
objective one should set for oneself is to be sought
within oneself, in die relation of oneself to oneself."
In die earlier The Uses of Pleausre: The History of
Sexuality, voi 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Random House, 1986): 29ff), similar themes are
raised t h o u g h h e r e he is s p e a k i n g of a
'decipherment' of the self by oneself, rather than
the relation per se.
!0
Ibid., Foucault, The Care of the Self 6 5 , my
emphasis. .As Seneca writes: " T h e soul stands on
unassailable grounds, if it has abandoned external
things; it is independent in its own fortress; and
every weapon dial is hurled falls short of the mark."
(Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, as quoted in ibid.,
Foucault, The Care of the Self 82, 5).
11
In responding to a query on 'postmodernism',
and whether or not the term is worth keeping,
Foucault raises the issue of how one 'reads' die
different uses of reason, its historical effects, its
limits and its dangers. I point this out in order to
underscore that by accepting or even paying
attention to the 'greek' conversio ad se, this is not
meant to imply or demand "some cheap [nostalgia
for) some imaginary past form of happiness dial
people did not, in fact, have a t all." (Michel
Foucault, "Space, Knowledge and Power", op. cit.,
The Foucault Reader, 248). O n die other hand, it is
not meant to designate it as 'wrong' either. Indeed,
diere is no moralistic implication - though, as one
might already detect, an ethical one is ready to
hand.
B
This point is made more forcefully in James
Bernauer's excellent study on Foucault. Michel
Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics of Thought
(New Jersey and London: Humanities Press, 1992):
especially chapter six, "Ecstatic Thinking", 171-
84.
 n 2>
Michel Foucault, "Preface", in GUles Deleuze Georges Bataille, "The Solar .Anus", in his Visions
and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and of Excess, ed. and intro. .Allan Stoekl, trans. .Allan
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie,
Helen R. L a n e ( L o n d o n : Athlone Press, 1984 Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
(1972)): xiii. 1985): 9.

Sue Golding, political philosopher and theatre director. Born in New York, resident
in London, her bacchanalia spans the mobile arts, digital media and the monastery
of libraries. Continues to write and lecture extensively on the democratic and radical
technologies of contemporary political philosophy, ethics and aesthetics and is Reader
at the University of Greenwich in that field.
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