Programa de desarrollo tecnológico

In The Oxford English Dictionary, the etymological origins of ‘impersonal’ as an adjective are derived from the late Latin word impersonalis, which combines the forms of ‘in’ (not, opposite to) and ‘personalis’ (personal). In terms of grammar, it can be traced back to 1520, when it is cited as ‘if it be a verbe impersonal’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014 [Online] Available from: http://tinyurl.com/nkz7hda [Accessed 31/01/14]). By 1620, ‘impersonal’ is also defined and ‘applied to other parts of speech which have no inflexions’ (ibid), as well as ‘not pertaining to or connected with any particular person or persons; having no personal reference or connection’ (ibid). For

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instance, in 1880, The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘the jewels and other appointments of the harem are quite impersonal, belonging to the establishment and not to any of their successive wearers’ (ibid). Here the ways that the impersonal is ‘not possessing or endowed with personality; not existing or manifested as a person’ (ibid) begins to demonstrate that there is a Symbolic and, thus, definitional limit in language to the term ‘personal’; this being the ‘impersonal’ adjective as ‘an impersonal thing or creature’ (ibid).

Impersonality, as a noun, is a variant of impersonal, and refers to the feature described by the adjective. Here, there is a linguistic paradox in that the expression of a subject’s impersonality is enabled through a personalising trope of identification with that subject. It is also in the grammatical and semantic tensions between personality and impersonality that the terms themselves are expressed or reverberated as ‘words’ (Riley, 2005, p.25). That is, as Symbolically impersonal words that can only be understood through their ‘truly impersonal quality’ (ibid) as words. In so doing, the impersonality of the term itself in the Symbolic can be ‘return[ed] to the generality of utterance from whence it came […] to acknowledge its superb and sublime capacity to take me or leave me’ (ibid). This directs the countenance of impersonality towards a psychoanalytic expression of an impersonal subject as ‘it’ rather than ‘I’. In so doing, this also locates that subject as a Symbolic rather than an Imaginary concern within psychoanalysis. This occurs because ‘it’ does not have a clear subject, which alerts us to its Symbolic impersonality both in, and of language. Whereas ‘I’ seems to address and refer to a subject that is ‘personal’ and thus configured as Imaginary. However if both ‘it’ and ‘I’ are considered through the Symbolic force of language and articulated in ways which are impersonal we begin to see that ‘I’ also has the capacity position the subject impersonally in language.

Deploying a formal use of the impersonal in language also depersonalises the characteristics of the writer’s personality. Here, the seduction of personal pronouns, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘our’, are replaced by impersonal objects and, in English more specifically, impersonal verbs. Impersonal verbs, which use the impersonal pronoun of ‘it’ (as in ‘it’s raining’, it’s sunny’, it’s windy’), are also those verbs in English that do not indicate any direct individual actions or personal incidences specific to a personalised grammatical subject. They ‘have the subject it […and] do not form a sharply defined class’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014 [Online] Available from:

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http://tinyurl.com/nkz7hda [Accessed 31/01/14]). Rather, the impersonal verb lacks a coherent subject, and in so doing, alerts us through language to the impersonality of that to which it refers. Here, the subject remains distant and implied rather than subjective and emotive. When a personal pronoun, such as ‘I’, is displaced by an impersonal pronoun, such as ‘it’, the subject is once again impersonalised and expressed as something rather than someone. We see the ambiguities in practice when someone (‘I’) is transposed into something (’it’) on a discourse such as the online ‘personals’ website of dudesnude.com. Here the gay male subject may address, refer to, and engage with the other users as ‘someone’ through the use of personal pronouns (‘I think you’re hot’, ‘You are sexy’, ‘I want to suck your dick’), but these ‘I’s’ are only enabled through the construction of the user as an impersonal ‘something’ within the broader Symbolic dimensions of the language. This occurs when the subject and the other are more obviously impersonalised with the pronoun of ‘it’ (‘it’s a sexy picture’, ‘it’s really turning me on’, ‘it’s so hot’). Whilst ‘it’ indicates that the personality of the user has the potential to become impersonal, we also see that ‘I’ relies upon ‘it’ to personalise the other and desire in language.

The construction of impersonality in language and how it is allied to gay male desire in psychoanalysis can be situated through Freud’s paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914 [2012]). Here, Freud suggests that the relationship between the processes of personal self-identification and an impersonal identification with the ‘same’ may be dualistically expressed as homosexual/narcissistic love. This love for the same gender and/or for the self is also mediated through tensions in language. These occur between the Symbolic as an impersonal force and the Imaginary as a personal expression of auto-eroticism with that gender and/or self (Dean, 2001). In turn, this auto-eroticism and the transient satisfaction that the subject feels during a process such as masturbation are experienced as a personal pleasure, both embodied and experienced through the gendered body of that subject. That is, a pleasure experienced as unique, specific, and intensely self-referential to the gay male subject. The notion that a love or desire for the same gender can be also be allied to a love for the subject’s own gendered and sexed body (in this case the masculine and the phallus) also positions narcissistic identification as one that occurs through a paradox of self- pleasuring, self-anxiety, and ‘otherness’. In the last century and in terms of a personality and/or identity, the homosexual narcissist that Freud is alluding to has also

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been epistemologically constructed and ontologically identified as a person who is perverse, deviant, aberrant, or simply ‘ill’. Homosexuals have been perceived as tied to, and restricted by, either a psychosexual/psychological stage, a specifically personal and subjectively nuanced narcissistic condition, or series of unresolved Oedipal conflicts (see summaries, for instance, in Lewes 1995; and Dean and Lane 2001a). This personification reflects how much thinking, therapy, and scholarship in the sphere of sexuality is dominated by identity-based models that metaphorically tie homosexuality to a narcissistic personality and thus pathology. Just as the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis is ambiguous, rhetorical (as much as clinical) versions of psychoanalysis have found it difficult to resolve problems and confusions in the theorisation of matters concerning gay male sex, sexuality, gender, and desire in terms of a gay male personality.

Homosexual narcissism and a narcissistic personality are also built around the contradictions riven through narcissistic and anaclitic object-choices (Dean, 2001, p.124). Here the fissures which exist between narcissism and anacliticism are relevant to the ways in which this chapter and the thesis more broadly addresses impersonality, metonymy, and ‘Bodies that Stutter’ as features of gay desire that through jouissance undermine the Imaginary-ego. Dean differentiates between narcissism and anacliticism by stating that whilst ‘Anaclisis determines object choice based on parental care […] by contrast narcissistic object-choice entails a person loving (a) what he himself is, (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be, or (d) someone who was once part of himself’ (ibid). Here, the anaclitic self-discipline of object-choice is positioned in opposition and contrast to narcissistic self-satisfaction. These divisions of the anaclitic and the narcissistic self are supposed to correspond in Freud (1914) to the distinctions between homosexual narcissist and heterosexual anaclist as a personality or identity, yet we see, in every dimension of Lacan, that they begin to implode the moment the distinction is made.

More specifically and in a similar way to the modification of condensation and displacement into metaphor and metonymy, we begin to see this in how Lacan re- works Freud’s concept of narcissism in the Imaginary register and the mirror stage. In the specular dimensions of the mirror, the narcissistic ego ‘discerns a subjective relation to otherness’ through the ‘ego’s identification with an image outside itself, a reflection’ (Dean, 2001, p.126); it is in this reflection that the refracted or shattered

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self of the self-absorbed narcissist struggles to identify with and articulate a coherent personality through what is re-presented as an impersonal image of his narcissistic ego. This image becomes a continuous threat to the subject’s ego and their understanding of their own personality and the personalisation of the other. This is the foundation to the analyses of ‘Bodies that Stutter’ in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 and the ways in which they have the potential to point the gay ego in the direction of a shattering/stuttering of desire which might be realised beyond the physicality and presence of people.

The potential that a shattered ego and ‘Bodies that Stutter’ have to undermine the Imaginary-ego is connected to what Bruce Fink identifies as ‘that Other kind of talk’ (1995, p.3); that is, the stuttering of an ego that is both sustained and disavowed by the Symbolic in language. Here, the ‘words that are spoken, blurted out, mumbled, or garbled come from some other place, some other agency than the ego’ (ibid, p.3-4) and, thus, destabilise the ego. In this thesis it is through this destabilisation of ‘words’ (and their translation through the signifier) that desire cannot be fully expressed and articulated. These faltering and stuttering significations are the ones that can only be partially expressed via the Symbolic and jouissance. They also form the stutters that position the aimless, random, and obtuse slips in language close to how desire is always expressed both metonymically and impersonally. This approach to the impersonality of identity and ego can also be found in the critical reconsiderations of the narcissistic gay man in Edelman’s concept of ‘“narci-schism”’ (1994) and Bersani’s critical exploration of impersonal narcissism (1986, 1987, 1995, 2008), which push gay masculinity towards practices of narcissism outside of the gay male ego and its Imaginary other.

Edelman’s theory of theory of ‘“narci-schism”’ (1994, p.108-110) adds another dimension to what has been developed so far because it suggests that the active (heterosexual) subject differentiates himself from the non-differentiation of the gay narcissist through the process of ‘“narci-schism”’ (ibid, p.110). Edelman understands that there is an Imaginary relation between the narcissistic gay subject and the mirror as constitutive of gay subjectivity, and, in turn, gay desire. Yet, as Edelman argues, this is also the foundation for an alternative notion of gay subjectivity or activism that would involve a self-disciplined depersonalisation of narcissism as “narci-schism”, so that ‘the luxurious “passivity” derided as “narcissism”, that signifies the erotic indulgence of the [gay] self that always threatens to undo the “self”’ (1994, p.110) is

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either undermined or removed. In this instance, “narci-schism”, which is assimilated from the ‘erotic mode of the dominant [straight male] subject’ (ibid) as self- disciplinary, has the potential to simultaneously reposition the gay male narcissist and his capacity as a ‘mirror bound narcissist[s] reviled for a passivity’ (ibid, p.108) as a ‘narci-schisist’. That is, the gay subject who moves beyond his Imaginary-ego and the metaphors of gay identity towards a way of expressing his subjectivity (and jouissance) Symbolically and impersonally. For instance, in the discourse of Triga Films, we see how gay masculinity holds the potential for “narci-schism”, through its simultaneously ambivalent assimilation and subversion of hyper-straight masculinity. In these productions, the nuances of a narcissistic and Imaginary gay ego jostle with those of the straight anaclist. In this way the films produced by Triga shape a representational ‘schism’ which allows ‘Bodies that Stutter’ to sway between straight and gay masculinity. In turn, the tensions between the Symbolic and jouissance developed above also allow the subjects and the consumers of the pornographic text to both negate and affirm gay and straight masculinity as ‘narci-schisist’. More broadly and in terms of how the argument is being developed this alerts us to the ways in which masculinity is subjugated by an Imaginary narcissism and the ego, but also one that has the potential to use the Symbolic to reposition how desire and jouissance are realised and expressed.

In this way, the potential ruptures that the ‘narci-schisist’ and “narci-schism” instil can also contribute to considerations allied to narcissism and the Imaginary subject of desire seen in Bersani’s theory of a ‘self-shattering’ of the ego and subjectivity (Bersani, 1987, p.222). This shattering can be understood as a conceptualisation of the ‘self’ that Bersani recognises via Freud’s assertions that the narcissistic ‘sexualising of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego’ (2008, p.66). In ways which will be developed and embedded in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 we see that this self- shattering can be allied to ‘Bodies that Stutter’ because both ‘bring[s] subjects together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart’ (ibid, p.96). By aligning a shattering of the ego to a stuttering of the body it is also useful to think about how in his early use of the terms, Bersani used shattering as a device to imagine gay masculinity ‘in which […] the self is exuberantly discarded’ (1987, p.217-18). Aligning this to how metonymy, impersonality, desire, and jouissance are being positioned in this thesis also emphasises how the personal

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nuances of the Imaginary and its narcissism in the mirror stage lead us to claims that it is through the self-shattering of the ego, and through the ego’s own struggles with narcissistic and ‘narci-schisistic’ desire, that something Besrani constitutes as ‘“impersonal narcissism” begins to make its own insensible sense’ (Bersani and Phillips, 2008, p.92). In this setting, impersonal narcissism engages with what Bersani refers to as ‘a certain type of failure in Freud’s thought’ (1986, p.3) and, more specifically, Freud’s concept of narcissism. Bersani believes that these failures (in Freud but also in psychoanalysis more generally) can produce ‘a process of theoretical collapse’ (ibid, p.2-3) that should be embraced ‘because of those errors’ (Kollias, 2013, p.992).

Impersonal narcissism also builds upon another of Bersani’s earlier concepts of ‘homo-ness’, in which he suggests a ‘redefinition of [gay] sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself’ (1995, p.7). At this point it is possible to position impersonality alongside of a ’homo-ness [that] offers an anti-identitarian identity’ (ibid, p.101), in which homosexual desire for the ‘same’ allies itself to an unconscious ‘difference’ already riven into the homosexual subject’s ego. An impersonality of desire is also close to how homo-ness may well allow for homosexual (and indeed heterosexual) desire to position homo-ness as the ‘privileged model of sameness – one that makes manifest not the limits but the inestimable value of relations of sameness, of homo-relations’ (ibid, p.6-7). In turn, this also works against the ‘narcissism of a securely mapped ego’ (ibid, p.125) and the location of a narcissistic homosexual identity. Homo-ness indicates that homosexuality and desire are infused with ‘an impersonal sameness ontologically incompatible with analysable egos’ (ibid), which both energises and eradicates the possibility of gay male personality, identity, and self-hood. If we once again use Triga Films to illustrate this point, we can see that this occurs in terms of how these ‘homo- relations’ may be articulated.

In the third scene of the production Dads and Lads Weekender (2010), a group of five straight young ‘lads’ are watching straight pornography the night before an important football match. As the narrative of the scene evolves, the lads begin to masturbate in front of one another whilst making reference to how they would fuck the female subjects of the porn film they are watching. Here, the identification with straight lads watching straight porn and the invigoration of jouissance is not securely performed

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through an anaclitic straight male ego or a narcissistic form of gay identification. Rather, as the scene develops and the ‘straight lads’ move into a series of sexual encounters with one another, which centre around a straight lad being penetrated by a dildo and sucked off by another lad (Figure 2.3), we see that there is a transition from the personal positions of anaclitic identity and narcissistic desire discussed earlier, towards the nuances of impersonal desire that are more usefully positioned through Edelman’s “narci-schism”, Bersani’s self-shattering and impersonal narcissism, as well as the‘Bodies that Stutter’ in this thesis. This occurs because the expression of straight identity and gay desire simultaneously schism, shatter, and stutter when they are realised as jouissance. In this instance gay and/or straight desires (as anaclitic, as narcissistic) in the Imaginary are rendered as a series of Symbolic amalgamations which displace and undermine the ego. As a result, jouissance is connected to a Symbolic form of relationality that ‘require[s] a provisional withdrawal from [both homo and hetero] relationality itself’ (ibid, p.7). More so, the scene (and most of the output from Triga) disavows discernible gay identities and personalities as anaclitic and/or narcissistic to frame gay desire in terms of a sexual sameness both determined and abstracted by both hetero- and homosexuality yet, ultimately, manifested through series ‘of “homo-relations”’ (1995, p.7) that find their place in the schism, the shatter, and the stutter of jouissance. In this way the impersonal nuances of jouissance and the relations of sexual sameness between straight and gay male forms collapse into each other so that ‘clearly delimited and coherent identities […] become suspect’ (ibid, p.3).

Hector Kollias (2013) suggests that it is within the suspicions between gay and straight masculinities that ‘Bersani discovers ‘a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other’ (p.992). This relation between self and other, which Bersani develops out of homo-ness and situates as ‘impersonal narcissism’, is something that cannot be understood by the self as a narcissistic ego conveyed through personality. Rather, to grasp the impersonality of the ego and, thus, impersonal narcissism, Kollias suggests that narcissism has to be transposed into ‘a perfect knowledge of otherness’ (ibid). In this instance, that otherness is understood through Bersani’s claim that, rather than a love of the self or of persons, the kernel of impersonal narcissism is ‘object-love as self-love’ (1987, p.53-4). That is, a love or a desire for an impersonal object or identity that can only

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be understood outside of ‘the formation of the self-congratulatory ego’ (ibid, p.34). The couched desire for pornography, the desire for the vast rhetoric of sexual representation on tumblr.com, and the desire to engage in ‘personal’ networks of image and language exchange on dudesnude.com go some way towards this because they resituate the gay male narcissist as impersonally narcissistic, and, at their core, they allow and encourage the gay subject to desire impersonally and impersonally desire.

These shifts in the theory and analysis of the narcissistic gay man as a person or a personality are also the result of how we might understand jouissance as an attempt to articulate an Imaginary personality through the impersonality of the Symbolic Other. By locating sex and gender outside of the Imaginary-ego or that which is imagined as uniquely individual, Lacan begins to highlight how desire is mediated in terms of the Symbolic (or an impersonal pronoun such as ‘it’, impersonal tropes, objects, texts etc.) and not on the basis of the subject’s personality or the other’s ‘subjective’ identity. As Dean observes, whilst the ‘classical, poetic Figure’ of the mirror and ‘its seductive lure’ (2000, p.38) are useful tropes connected to narcissism, it is also vital to remember that mirrors and the Imaginary identifications associated with them are understood by