The Kiss of the Real and Lacans Ego Death

8/11/2019 The Kiss of the Real and Lacans Ego Death

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The Kiss of the Real and Lacan's Ego Death

Part I

Rebecca Bauknight

Cindy Sherman from her self- portrait collection.

The exploration of some of the most compelling art and writing of our times we witness identity

shattering and crumbling, we witness unprecedented anxiety over the death and resurrection

of identity as we have known it. There are so many absorptions and perpetrations ofknowledges, thoughts, information circulating at unprecedented and dizzying speed through

the advancements in social media. The absurdist writings of David Wallace Forster and Chuck

Palahnuik, as well the art of Cindy Sherman, the new surrealism digital pop movement with Ray

Caeser’s polyperverse sexualized girls in Victorian settings along with the grrrlesque poetry

movement indicates a surrealist trend reminiscent in America of post- war Europe when

surrealism erupted. The ethos and ambiance in these styles speak to the bits and pieces of the

subject in states that accentuate moving identities. Identities moving like sand, flowing

sometimes cutting the fingers. There is no longer a continuity of self to hold or behold. The

institution dissolves, the past dissolves, the world dissolves. The “I” dissolves.Art gives way to an expression of a much longer periods of time that we inhabit non- identity

states. As subjects come to terms with myriad identifications in relation to the global

perspectives and knowledge that hatchet identification markers…identity that had been much

less defined by outside influences before the internet.



Before 9/11, war, violence, poverty has been an aspect of other locations in the world…where

perhaps there is less tolerance for the pains of an adolescence/capitalism nation that knows it

now can never drive so fast again at night drunk and unconscious of horrific consequences. The

art I wish to explore here speaks to a location and a time that questions what befalls all

identities. In this art there is not a punctuation or a wrapping up or a solution, rather as the titleof David Wallace Forster’s novel suggests there are in these expressions a horrific interminable

“ Infitnite Jest “.

I believe within this larger questioning of identification “ isms” such as feminsim also moves

through a questioning and puzzling period. Perhaps, taking pause to express what it is that is so

perplexing about belonging and not belonging or to ask where one belongs now ?. What can

one count on as solid ? But perhaps it is in this expression of violence and vileness that is

depicted, the subject rather than pushed by an Other to claim any allegiance in belief to what

promises a future, rejects and pushes back any wholesale promise or optimism from an Other

about her place in the world. Rather than cordoning herself off as the non- polluted, pure,authentic, malleable, undefnined and the male as the polluted, precision wielding non- lacking

phallus who will write or ride the world, there is within grrrlesque a language that gives way to

her soiled and murderous pulsations, like new cards, she toys with different combinations

within a larger play of signifyers, not sure of what to do with them, and at the same time she

allows the cliché’s of girlness, and the gaze of the Other to keep gazing. She keeps looking at

her cards as so many signifiers that she can offer up.

We note gurlessque poet Kathy Wagner's (2004) ode to Bataille:

Macular Hole

Please god love me and buy me

Read this hillock and ride me

Wraith typing all day for money.

God bought me today for two silver fish in a can

God bought me tomorrow for bland in a pan

and a card an email from Rebecca

Bought four hours of my control alt delete shut down

Bought a new day-section with a headstand

My commerce in shall

Sky like a grandstand

Transact

God performed me today for a half minute

lucky

in locker room hiding my boobs from the kids



and my hair is silky and my mane shot silk gold

Bought a book on economy

Georgie Bataille

Called about plane tickets

Georgie Bataille

I bought my debt today

Georgie Bataille hooray

Debt off my God today

God off my debt in a macular hole

I dream of an end like a fount to this night

Run thinner and thinner and then it’s all light

Macerated in signal

by my go I bought my ghost I walk my ghost

What moves through her language circuit is a sense she is carving of the relationship with her

body and the world. These art works serve not simply as a catharsis or mirror. Much of what

the “ thought world” offers on existence moves us into a Kantian phallic economy of goods. We

want to identify with being on the side of the good in this world of horror of course. We risk

identifying with “good thinking’ as good thinking subjects through a tendency of jouissance to

give into demand, yet again to accommodate the next best appearing phallus. Particularly as

institutions, nations, identies become questions. But grrrlesque is in service of the Lacanian cut

as she pulls the rug from beneath us. The Narcissistic supply is empty. She returns us to

dissolution.

I am using a capital “Z” to differentiate mark prior feminism into something other. A state of

feminiZm that coalesces through another time in its language as grrrlessque marks a new style,

song, being expressed through females that is xtra- ordinary, surplus, planting what was always

considered the perverse into herself as now both voyeur and victim of the crime scene, along

with wording her pleasure in her sadistic imaginings.

When Aylin Bloch Boynukisa writes in ‘The Geneology of the Girl Organ’: ‘I change course withmy porcelain eye/my blinking gigantic doll eye,’ it’s a change of course I can believe in.” The

statement is filled with the irony, that what is believable today is the unbelievable. This we can

have an assurance about. We might say that this art signals a time to embrace the dream as

much closer to the real than any conscious thought. The social political fabric through which

reality would be constituted or held was for the surrealist unreal and dangerous. The surrealist



rejected in a sense any political “reality” as the real. Grrrlesque gives us pause. We need

pause.

I would argue that we see in this movement a re- engagement with the phallus. She is wielding

the mythic phallus. She is separating the phallus from the “reality biology historical political

body”, which is so easily ensconced in the imaginary and symbolic, from the real. In allowing abelief in the imagination as very separate from the truth of her body in the real…she as a

speaking subject now has the freedom to reemerge on the side of desire…rather than

continually being taken up by demand. Through the surplus and the gift of the feminine

jouissance…the surplus jouissance…she as subject can exist, live, be resurrected and experience

life as a subject in desire as opposed to demand.

She moves us from the time of “The Desert of the Real” into a time of ‘The Kiss of the Real” in

the time of Lacan. We move into the later Lacan’s notion of the Lacanian surplus. In this Kiss

we cut. Kiss and Cut. Cut and Kiss Off… allowing utmost extimacy.

Lacan recognized that a surplus is left over from subjects division by language ….and is cast off

into what appears to be an exterior by the conscious subject who experiences internalized and

externalized self. The cast off object a then moves about through appearances of the elusive

thing that is impossible to bare. Our gaze locks on objects of desire. An object that becomes

increasingly regulated within the structuration of the oedipal subject into social symbolic

world…that structures and limits transgressions, deadly impulses, taboos. The “thing” the

commodity this includes “thought” what appears to fill up from the outside in

recognition….love, revolution, money, meaning is always siphoned off of what we can’t have in

reality of our unconscious wishes…that which is connected to the transgressive impulse of eros.We go after things in substitution stumbling on what will never make the mark. We go after a

objects in the real imagining futures that allow what reality will never will.

Psychoanalysis simply amplifies this structure of what is impossible about the object of the aim

to be possessed. The surplus is operating always outside of the phallic economy and will never

be gathered there. But it can be gathered. These expressions of art where dissolution, the

non- whole, the fragment, the alien exists…there is a possibility of another kind of gathering

through a surplus that transports in the economy of the feminine jouissance. The gathering of

a subject. Through dissolution. Moving on the side of desire rather than to the tune of demand.

This encounter, the transversal…is the evental…it is intimate and immanent. It is the sacred.

There is no longer a thing to make an object out of including the object of the “self”. This event

of dissolution before words, beyond words, between words signed as in sign… through these

revelatory expressions in the art and writing world offer representations of identity liquidation.

Shards of identity like so many pieces of broken glass coming and going float the subject out

into the edges of identity through which the self is founded… In this there is the non- self….as of



a being that is universal. It is not an empty place as in a desert. It is the inhuman not yet formed

in letters. It is a whirl. It is that which is turned away from locked up, tortured, beaten. Warred

against..murdered in the form of the Other...abjected, feared and run from at the advent of

signification and formation of the ego. It is in motion. It is pulse. It is the horrible of the egos'

goodness…it is the darkness of the enlightened consciousness… it is the before of thesublimation necessitated by the ego that moves representations into the “higher and good”

realms of thought that turn so easily away from eros, death, the unconscious. The distant

pathos of dissolution where intellect cannot reason the irrational and the unthinkable of what is

of and not of the phallic. The surplus… haunts...the surplus...dissolves…It is moving…It is calling.

“… jouissance in Lacan, I would say, is made of two parts: a signifiable part, and a non-

signifiable part. And that condition gives a place to the other jouissance, the other-than-phallic

jouissance, and that's why Lacan would give a place to feminine sexuality not by revealing a

feminine signifier but by taking into account small "a" as surplus jouissance.” J.A.Miller.

http://youtu.be/EZMpp4f1uVY

Published on Nov 7, 2012

"In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line"

to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this figure asa model for various sexual, political, and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between

seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in

the twilight of American empire." Introduction to reading at City Arts.

To view Catherine Wagners' work I have included the following link.

http://www.fenceportal.org/?page_id=296#t3





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The Kiss of the Real and Lacans Ego Death