To cut, to split, to touch, to eat, as of a body or a text

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Notes

notes

I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and an anonymous reader for their incisive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. Nancy, “Corpus” 19; emphasis in original.

2. Lacan 139.

3. Gaitskill 131–47.

4. Cook argues that, because of its pop cultural references to self-help guides for the newly submissive, “Secretary takes up the discourse of S/M to the extent that it is a theatrical, self-conscious parody of its own commercialism.” However, Cook also notes that “The film's transgressive S/M performance is depicted as lighthearted fantasy. Its darker elements – Lee's self-mutilation, her father's alcoholism, her family's domestic abuse – are somehow all resolved as her masochism finds its satisfying complement in her new S/M relationship.” Thus, the transgressive parodic dimensions are supported – as, I argue, is the relationship itself – only through the expulsion of the cutting from the film (it is literally cut out). Cook 121–41.

5. Restuccia.

6. Singer 48.

7. The location of Esther's original trauma is reminiscent of the cuts up the calf in Baburen's painting The Flaying of Marsyas (c.1623), which leads from leg to genitals, eroticizing the painful ascent.

8. Esther's ethical practice does not line up with Slavoj Žižek's reading of cutting as a defense against virtuality and an attempt to reclaim a connection to the real. He writes:

• Recall the phenomenon of “cutters” (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject's inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order – with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signaling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality […] The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, they feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although […] cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown.

Žižek aims at but misses Esther, whose project is not a defense against but a rabid pursuit of psychosis through self-devouring (his account does remind one of Lee). Rather than reclaiming a relation to the real of the body, it is more an attempt to rewrite what the real of the body is in the first place. In this sense, Esther has much in common with Antigone, the heroine of Lacanian and neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis – marked in her ethical success by her refusal to give up on her desire, even as it leads to her inevitable death. See Žižek.

9. “Refer, v.,” defs. 1a–4a, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).

10. “Alternatively, adv.,” def. 1, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).

11. Nancy, “Fifty-Eight Indices on the Body” 150.

12. Nancy, “Corpus” 57.

13. Ibid.

14. Nancy's formulation is: “Feeling oneself touching you (and not ‘oneself’) – or else, identically, feeling oneself touching skin (and not ‘oneself’): the body is always forcing this thought farther forward, always too far” (ibid. 39; emphasis in original).

15. Ibid. 29.

16. Ibid. 31; emphasis in original.

17. Ibid. 9.

18. Lacan 195.

19. Irigaray 24.

20. Freud's model of auto-eroticism as a single mouth kissing itself loses some of the feminist register of Irigaray's model, but again, we ask: what, then, of one mouth eating itself?

21. Freud 276.

22. Ibid. 277.

23. Ibid.

24. Deutsch 412.

25. Silverman 190.

26. “Cut, sb.¹,” def. 2; “Cut, sb.²,” defs. 2a, 12b, 15; “Cut, v.,” def. 1a, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).

27. “Split, sb.¹,” def. 3a; “Split, v.,” defs. 3a, 3b, 4d, 16b; “Split, ppl. a.,” 3c, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).

28. For the canon on masochistic film spectatorship, see Studlar; Silverman; Shaviro. Some important work on horror films and pornography, respectively, makes reference to this structure as well; see Clover; Williams.

29. Shaviro 57.

30. Nancy, “Icon of Fury” 1–9. Originally published as “Icône de l’archarnement” in Trafic 39 (autumn 2001): 58–64. There are numerous possible points of connection between de Van's film and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day; for an excellent reading of the latter, see Morrey 10–30.