Seduction and Scandal
two kinds of relation with the thing

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Notes

notes

1. Note the language of violent retribution in the injunction: “If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matthew 18.8). Scandal is defined in biblical terms as “a word or action evil in itself, which occasions another's spiritual ruin” (New Advent Encyclopaedia).

2. The original French script is available at <http://www.geocities.com/jcsatterlee/cocteaulabelleetlabetescript.html> (accessed 17 Dec. 2007). The English translations are all mine.

3. Lacan calls this the event of jouissance. In his discussion of sublimation, which is, in a sense, a submission of desire to a law of a higher order, Lacan writes: “Sublimate as much as you like; you have to pay for it with something. And this something is called jouissance; I have to pay for that mystical operation with a pound of flesh” (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 322).

4. Baudrillard claims that seduction is “merely an immoral, frivolous, superficial, and superfluous process, limited to the realm of signs and appearances, devoted to pleasure and the usufruct of useless bodies” (Seduction 84).

5. Žižek indicates that, in subjective destitution, the subject finds itself “not only without the other qua our neighbor, but without support in the Other itself – as such, it is unbearably suffocating, the very opposite of relief, of ‘liberation’ ” (59).