Antecedentes referenciales

In ‘Shiny Sharp Things’ Califi a describes how in San Francisco’s leather community, cutting and presumably the rest of blood play is so identi-fi ed with women that the men in the community tend to dismiss it as

‘that lesbian thing’ (Califi a 1991: 333). One reason for this may be the stigma that blood has attained among gay men due to HIV/AIDS. Califi a theorises this phenomenon in terms of the psychic signifi cance of blood,

‘blood doesn’t mean the same thing to a man as it means to me¹ . . . I do

not have the same ambivalence that men have about being entombed/

enwombed’ (Califi a 1991: 334). Califi a’s observation supports Irigaray’s argument that,

[f]emale sexuality has always been conceived of on the basis of masculine parameters . . . In these terms, women’s erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis . . . a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back on itself, self-embracing.

(Irigaray 1985: 23)

Women’s sex, misperceived as a hole, confronts the subject with the ontological void that drives his subjectivity, as desire to cover the void by plugging it with a fetish. This Oedipal hermeneutic and its power to produce bodily experience is also refl ected in the reports of the prison psychiatrists who initially examined the patient whose case Vanden Bergh and Kelly reassess in Noll’s book. The same case is also presented in Louise Kaplan’s book Female Perversions. Kaplan cites the prison psychiatrists as saying that (what they call) sadomasochistic² scenarios where one or both of the participants is mutilated are the expression of a profound insult to the bodily integrity of one or both of the participants, which was sustained during their infancy. Hence they assert: ‘persons so abused never feel securely held together within the boundaries of their own skin’ (Kaplan 1997: 143). According to this account, the sadomasochist is haunted by the sense that he is spilling out of his skin or alternatively that the world is invading his body. Either way, there is a subjective experience of the dissolution of bodily boundaries that is experienced as distressing. The psychiatrists claim that adult sadomaso-chists supposedly create fantasies and enact scenarios to control and reg-ulate their bodily boundaries. In keeping with traditional psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference, the prison psychiatrists assert: ‘[i]n males, these leaky substances – mucus, urine, feces, even ejaculate – are uncon-sciously equated with a helpless dependency and a vulnerable feminin-ity’ (anonymous, cited in Kaplan 1997: 143). Thus, ‘[t]he performance of bodily mutilations, primitive and horrifying as it is to an observer, is reassuring to the protagonist, who can then feel more secure about his bodily boundaries, his self-identity, and his masculine narcissism’

(anonymous, cited in Kaplan 1997: 143). This would seem to contradict Califi a’s observation, yet these observations actually support Irigaray’s argument that the feminine is coded within masculine parameters in two contradictory but related ways – as lack and leak. Within this code, cutting would create lack and leak, tomb and womb simultaneously.

This may explain why blood is missing from the psychiatrist’s otherwise comprehensive list of bodily fl uids, which is odd in the context of a dis-cussion of blood fetishism. Is blood spilling from its facialised container too terrifying for the psychiatrists to mention in their list of leaky sub-stances? Is blood too feminine, since, after all, castration is bloodshed?

Whilst these citations show that the sliced, bleeding male body is quickly reterritorialised through diagnosis they also raise some interesting pos-sibilities. Is the bleeding cut a probe head, an eruption of polyvocality, a rhizome within the arborescences of the organism, of subjectivity and the phallogocentric economy of exchange? Is blood fl owing across skin a line of fl ight from the closed up, closed off body, which enables an intensive redistribution of the corporeal cartography, the organism to the intensities of a bloody BwO?

In many ways the cut is optimally positioned at the edges of the organ-ism to constitute a line of fl ight from it. The organorgan-ism is inscribed as such by the abstract machine of faciality in connection with the Oedipal machine, through castration. Every abstract machine is ‘defi ned by . . . cutting edges of decoding and deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510). Castration creates two edges. One borders a territory, the organism/subject, whilst the other borders the feminine. This is why ‘the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the production of a molecular woman’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 276). As many feminists have noted, this sounds suspicious. For example, Alice Jardine asks,

to the extent that women must ‘become woman’ . . . might that not mean that she must also be the fi rst to disappear? Is it not possible that the process of ‘becoming woman’ is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female fi gure caught in a whirling sea of male confi gurations.

A silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His metamorphosis? (Jardine 1984: 54)

Does the concept of becoming-woman locate the woman as the other whom subjectivity may plunder for transformative intensities whilst refusing to acknowledge women’s subjectivities, their sexed and other specifi cities, and the various oppressions against which women fi ght daily? Does becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari imagine it, cut women off from becoming woman in so far as they have no molar sub-jectivity to launch from? Lorraine argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-woman betrays a masculine bias since the

majori-tarian, which is masculine, is the territory from which becomings originate (Lorraine 1999: 186). This is because the feminine has been misrepresented as ‘not masculine’ in the great dualism machines, hence women have been denied access to their own subjectivity within the symbolic order (at least as Lacan describes it). Lorraine and other femi-nists rightly point out that the becoming-woman of each sex would not be the same since they each launch from two sexually specifi c territories.

Lorraine argues that rather than freeing creative possibilities, becoming-woman as Deleuze and Guattari imagine it may lead women to an empty BwO if no steps are taken to stabilise a molar subjectivity for women (Lorraine 1999: 186). These are serious concerns. Deleuze and Guattari encourage women to conduct a molar politics:

It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity . . . But it is dangerous to confi ne oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a fl ow.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279)

Deleuze and Guattari could be understood as advocating a double-edged politics, which requires women to draw molar lines on the one hand, with a view to winning back their own territory, and molecular lines on the other – deterritorialising from that territory so as not to become trapped within it. This fi ts with the feminine subjectivity that Lorraine advocates, via Irigaray – an identity that is ‘an open-ended system without specifi c content’ (Lorraine 1999: 187). In other words, feminine subjectivity would be a processual identity that, hopefully, is always becoming active in Nietzsche’s sense. If feminists proceed by drawing both molar and molecular lines then women’s becoming-woman need not lead women toward the kind of empty BwO that Jardine describes and feminism will remain a dynamic, open and active practice.

Cutting draws both molar and molecular lines. Through castration the feminine borders the subject, placing him in proximity with ‘parti-cles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proxim-ity, of a microfemininproxim-ity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 275).

The becoming-woman of man perverts his phallic fl esh, opens it out, connects it to the intensities of a feminine BwO non-volitionally, that is, whether he likes it or not. The subject’s becoming-woman via con-tagion with the microfeminine need not subtract from woman, whose becoming-woman proceeds from her own sexually specifi c cartography.

Irigaray remarks, ‘[b]y our lips we are women’ (Irigaray 1985: 209–10).

This statement could be interpreted as claiming that the presence of labia defi nes a woman in the molar sense. From here one may call for a specifi cally feminine subjectivity and modes of representation that are premised upon women’s sexually specifi c morphology, as Irigaray does.

Additionally one might read Irigaray’s lips as a threshold from which to launch on becoming-woman as well as becoming-haemosexual. Through the work of Irigaray, Lorraine, Braidotti and others the oral and genital lips, indiscernibly, are by now familiar thresholds from which to launch on becoming-woman. The lips of a cut in the skin are labial machines of a different kind; probe heads where the polyvocality of the head erupts, releasing intensities that inspire becoming-haemosexual.

Labial machines populate many territories; they are located on the face, they are female genitals, or they can be created almost anywhere on a body by cutting. This is not to confl ate the different signifi cations of each machine. The lips on the face are territories of a different type than either labia or the edges of a cut in the skin and each territory acts as the ground for a politics that is specifi c to it. What all of these lips have in common, though, is that they are all facialised as edges surrounding a void – precisely a hole-envelope. If the body is a multi-dimensional map upon a single plane then the lips are formed via folding. Deleuze and Guattari describe how the folds of the fl esh become molar, ‘the line is subordinated to the horizontal and vertical; the line forms a contour . . .’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 505). In so far as the line curves around a void, the lips are annexed to the phallus – they are made into a mascu-line organ turned back on itself, or as Irigaray puts it, self-embracing.

However, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise moving between. ‘The only way to get out of the dualism machines is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 305). Lips are also the intermezzo. To paraphrase Irigaray, lips touch themselves, in and of themselves, all the time, without any need for mediation, without any way to distinguish between activity and passivity, ‘already two – but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each other’ (Irigaray 1985: 24).

Lips are composed of sensitive surfaces in contact, ‘[n]either one nor two. I’ve never known how to count’ (Irigaray 1985: 207). As Deleuze and Guattari argue, two or more folds in contact ‘opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 190). The feminine, the other side of the cut, is intensive – composed of ‘n molecular sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 277).

The feminine is precisely this realm of possibility that potentialises the possible. Becoming-woman is launched between the lips, at the

thresh-old between the fl eshy fthresh-olds. In this sense becoming-woman is already occurring ‘within’ every subject.

Between labial folds a multiplicity of intensities may pass. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249). Locking lips with a lover, seeing, smelling, smearing and tasting a lover’s blood, or indeed taking blood as one’s lover, adds new dimensions to the multiplicity, draws lines of fl ight down which haemosexual desire fl ees the face. ‘Haemosexual’ describes a wide variety of ways of encounter-ing blood. Rather than transcribe them into conventional sexual acts haemosexual encounters may be described as a multiplicity of connec-tions that compose an experiment to create a bloody BwO. For example:

Eyes closed, passive, nostrils fl aring as they follow the ferrous scent. Lips slightly parted, swollen like two grapes about to burst. Tongue escap-ing its clammy cavern, anxious for the taste of copper and salt, iron and sugar. Skin luminous, glowing like an ember around the edges of a stingy seam. Blood quivering between lips, maintaining itself within a shy red meniscus. Surface tension. Lips fl ying through the air, keenly closing the space between bodies. Lips lock (two more? Does that make four?).

Stinginess surpasses heat then fades as warm blood fl ows between lips. A ferrous taste, a meaty scent, a sweet aftertaste. A thought intrudes, ‘you have been eating brown rice’. Eyes spring open. You are so very red . . .

‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25)

The face, White Man himself, territorialises bodies and blood, deploy-ing their forces toward the repetition of the Same. The face fi xes fl esh, inscribing a subject whose desire signifi es his ‘sexuality’. Sexuality is an anchor, a point of access for the face to the forces of the fl esh, via herme-neutic technologies like psychoanalysis or The Australian Red Cross Blood Service’s donor questionnaire. With these technologies the face distributes subjects of sexuality across a grid of prescribed sexual sub-jectivities, which are measured as degrees of deviance from White Man.

Thus the transformative power of desire is disavowed in favour of onto-logical stasis. Yet sexuality is not a subjective attribute to be scrutinised and fi xed. White Man is defi ned in opposition to that which it excludes – the feminine. Feminine is a name for difference beyond difference-from-White-Man. For this reason, all becomings proceed through, but by no means fi nish with, becoming-woman. Thus, ‘[k]nowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a woman; it means extracting from one’s sex the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the fl ows, the n sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:

277). Loving haemosexually does not mean remaining a man, a woman,

a pervert, a sex radical; it means opening one’s lips to the intensities that fl ow across a bloody BwO.

References

‘Australian Red Cross Blood Service’, http://www.donateblood.com.au

Califi a, P. (1991), Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, Berkeley:

Cleiss Press.

Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco:

City Lights Books.

Deleuze, G. (2002), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, London: Continuum.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Irigaray, L. (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Jardine, A. (1984), ‘Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and His Br(others)’, Substance, 13:

3/4, 46–60.

Kaplan, L. J. (1997), Female Perversions, Maryland: Jason Aronson Publishing.

Lorraine, T. (1999), Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

MacCormack, P. (2008), ‘Necrosexuality’, in N. Giffney and M. J. Hird (eds), Queering the Non/Human, England: Ashgate, 339–62.

Noll, R. (1992), Vampires, Werewolves and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature, New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Parr, A. (2005), The Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Notes

1. At the time of writing ‘Shiny Sharp Things’ Califi a identifi ed as a woman, or at least she used the female pronoun. However Califi a has since transitioned, hence the use of the masculine pronoun in reference to him throughout this chapter.

2. Sadomasochists aim to play within the BDSM golden rule of safe, sane and consensual. What the prison psychiatrists mistake for sadomasochism is actually criminal violence against a non-consenting victim, thus it is not sadomasochism.