Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism

Abstract

Abstract: Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic human being by triggering a process of inner estrangement that enables one to recognize the otherness within oneself. This analysis is based mainly on Mikhail Bakhtin's grotesque as presented in his Rabelais and His World (1965). This self-introspection serves as the basis for an ethical eroticism through which one shall transform oneself into a fully fledged moral and sensual subject. In formulating this argument, the author draws on Simone de Beauvoir's own attempt to link the erotic to the ethical. As will be seen, the same principle that stands at the heart of a phenomenological ethics also steers the author's phenomenological conception of the erotic. The principle in question is carnal intersubjectivity-bodies that penetrate one another and merge, yet never lose themselves in the other's carnality. Put differently, they remain non-objectified subjects. The grotesque subject is presented as a figuration that helps shed light on the way the subject has been conceived by, above all, phenomenological and postmodern theorists. The author then explores some of the ethical ramifications of this conceptualization. Drawing on these insights, the author fashions an ethical eroticism that derives from a grotesque subjectivity.

Keywords:

• grotesque
• phenomenology
• de Beauvoir
• Bakhtin
• ethics
• eroticism
• Sade
• embodiment

Notes

¹See, for example, Debra Bergoffen, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: (Re)counting the Sexual Difference’, in Claudia Card (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 248–65; Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997; Barbara Klaw, ‘Sexuality in Beauvoir's “Les Mandarins”’, in Margaret Simons (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995, pp. 193–223; Fredrika Scarth, The Other Within: Ethics, Politics and The Body in Simone de Beauvoir, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

²See Bergoffen, The Philosophy; see also Scarth, The Other Within.

³Merleau-Ponty is among the phenomenologists who emphatically objected to the commonplace attempts on the part of philosophers to represent reality by means of simple one-dimensional theories which jettison ambiguity by choosing either empirical reality or the inner reality of the mind in order to explain and represent the world and our knowledge thereof. Like my theory of the grotesque, Merleau-Ponty stressed ambiguity and complexity as the fundaments of existence and epistemic processes (for example, perception): ‘I have tried, first of all, to re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness. These philosophies commonly forget-in favor of a pure exteriority or of a pure interiority-the insertion of the mind in corporeality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively, with perceived things’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, (240–60) pp. 3–4.

⁴The grotesque has a long history in aesthetics. The first essays dealing in one way or another with the subject were written during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Some important examples are: John Addington Symonds, ‘Caricature, the Fantastic, the Grotesque’, in Essays Speculative and Suggestive, London: Smith, Elder, 1890, pp.; G.F.W. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, London: Osmaton, Bell, 1920; Victor Hugo, Preface du ‘Cromwell’, ed. Edmond Wahl, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1827; John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851-53), London: Routledge, 1907. For a compelling discussion on the nineteenth-century grotesque, see Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. In the following, I will be mainly using contemporary analysis of the grotesque, which reviews many of the earlier discussions on the subject while adding some interesting new insights.

⁵See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963; Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987; Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, London: Methuen, 1972; Wilson Yates, ‘An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological Considerations’, in James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates (eds), The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 1–68.

⁶For more on the grotesque as hybrid, see Kuryluk, Ewa, 1987, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, pp. 17, 75–6, 319; Harpham, On the Grotesque, pp. 11, 21, 62; Yates, ‘An Introduction’, pp. 16, 50.

⁷The monstrous grotesque is discussed in the following works: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction: From Wonder to Error-A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp. 1–22; Harpham, On the Grotesque, p. 8; Kuryluk, Salome and Judas, p. 302; James Luther Adams, ‘The Grotesque and Our Future’, in Adams and Yates, The Grotesque, pp. 69–74; Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968, p. xxx; Yates, ‘An Introduction’, p. 7.

⁸For more on the grotesque as irrational, see Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; Wright, A History of Caricature, p. x. On the grotesque as absurd, see Kayser, The Grotesque, pp. 37, 53, 184–8; Yates, ‘An Introduction’, p. 18. On the grotesque as deformity, see Kuryluk, Salome and Judas, pp. 303–4; Thomson, The Grotesque, pp. 26–7; Yates, ‘An Introduction’, pp. 42, 44, 55, 56.

¹²Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 26; my emphasis.

⁹Bakhtin contrasts grotesque bodies with those of the classical Renaissance in Rabelais and His World, pp. 24–5.

¹⁰See Thomson, The Grotesque, p. 35; Kuryluk, Salome and Judas, p. 318.

¹¹This should be understood as a consequence of the grotesque hybridity and its conflictive essence. For more on this particular facet, see Harpham, On the Grotesque, p. 45; Thomson, The Grotesque, pp. 11, 18, 20, 60; Wright, A History of Caricature, p. xxxviii; Yates, ‘An Introduction’, pp. 44–5.

¹³Excessiveness is a central feature of the grotesque. This point is made in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 320–3; Harpham, On the Grotesque, p. 31; Kuryluk, Salome and Judas, p. 302; Thomson, The Grotesque, pp. 38–9.

¹⁴These science-fiction representations of the cyborg tend, even if not in a clearly intentional manner, to try and escape the ‘fleshed body’ with the objective of becoming what the classical and modern representations of the subject refer to as a ‘pure mind’. 15. For more on this phenomenon, see the following studies: Mary Ann Doane, ‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine’, in Jenny Wolmark (ed.), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 20–33; Zoe Sofia, ‘Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View’, in Wolmark, Cybersexualities, pp. 55–68; Claudia Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, in Wolmark, Cybersexualities, pp. 34–54.

¹⁵For more on grotesque epistemologies and the grotesque subject as a radical deviation from the norm, see Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 10.

¹⁶Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [1964], trans. from the French by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 142; my emphasis.

¹⁷Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1948, pp. 12–22.

¹⁸Insofar as de Beauvoir was concerned, this idea is the lynchpin of her theory on ethics. Conversely, the pure consciousness is personified by Fosca, the main character of her novel All Men Are Mortal (1946). According to Barbara Andrew: ‘Immortality allows Fosca to stand outside human reality. He cannot risk his life for a cause or dedicate himself to loving one person. He will live forever; his life cannot be risked, his beloved will be left. He forgets the significance of others’ existence, the importance of each individual's freedom. And so he forgets where value springs from, and he is no longer part of the human world. His own freedom no longer has meaning. As such, he views himself outside morality. He is surely outside an embodied ethic. He is also outside ambiguity, because the limitations of his bodily existence are no longer meaningful. Thus he cannot participate in making meaning’. Barbara S. Andrew, ‘Beauvoir's Place in Philosophical Thought’, in Card, The Cambridge Companion, 24–44 (pp. 36–7); my emphasis.

¹⁹Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [1949], trans. from the French and ed. by Howard M. Parshley, New York: Vintage Books, 1989, pp. 402, 499.

²²De Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, pp. 32–3.

²⁰For de Beauvoir, the erotic encounter is the quintessential ethical act. Two of the most enlightening works on the Beauvoirian erotic and its connection to ethics are Bergoffen, The Philosophy and Scarth, The Other Within. Both scholars agree that her conceptualization of the erotic (which they fully agree is based on a phenomenological ambiguity of bodies and their relations) is capable of undergirding a politico-ethical theory and way of life. In this respect, there appears to be a strong affinity between de Beauvoir's ethics and the ethics of care (for example, the work of Carol Gilligan). For more on this subject, see Kristana Arp, ‘A Different Voice in the Phenomenological Tradition: Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethic of Care’, in Linda Fisher and Lester E. Embree (eds), Feminist Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000, pp. 71–81; Barbara S. Andrew, ‘Care, Freedom, and Reciprocity in the Ethics of Simone de Beauvoir’, Philosophy Today 42:3, 1998, pp. 290–300.

²¹Simone de Beauvoir, Faut-il brler Sade? Paris: Gallimard, 1955. The English rendition that I have cited from is ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, trans. from the French by Annette Michelson, in Simone de Beauvoir, The Marquis de Sade: An Essay by Simone de Beauvoir, with Selections from His Writings Chosen by Paul Dinnage, London: John Calder, 1962, pp. 11–82.

²³De Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, p. 41; my emphasis.

²⁴For more on this claim, see Sara Heinmaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, pp. 63–4.

²⁵De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 402.

²⁶De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 71.