Porn

 

Porn is a matter of bare life on display. The antagonist of eros, it annihilates even sexuality. In this respect, it is more effective than morality: “Sexuality does not fade into sublimation, repression and morality, but fades much more surely into the more sexual than sex: porn.”1 Pornography derives its appeal from the “anticipation of dead sex in living sexuality.”2 What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all. Today, sexuality is not threatened by that “pure reason” which puritanically avoids sex as something “dirty,”3 but by pornography. Porn is not sex in virtual space. Today, even real sex is turning into porn.

The pornographication of the world is unfolding as the profanation of the world. Porn profanes the erotic. Agamben’s “In Praise of Profanation” fails to recognize this social process. “Profanation” means using things that have been set aside for the gods through consecration (sacrare) and stand removed from regular contact. It involves practicing “a special form of negligence”4 with respect to what has been set apart in this manner. Hereby, Agamben adopts the thesis of secularization, assuming that every instance of setting-apart has an authentically religious core. In this light, the museum represents a secularized form of the temple — here, too, objects are placed at a remove and made unavailable for use. Likewise, Agamben considers tourism a secularized version of pilgrimage: pious journeys from holy site to holy site correspond, today, to sightseers’ restless trips through a world that has become one big museum.

Agamben places profanation alongside secularization. What has been made to stand apart should be made available for use again. However, the examples of profanation he provides range from the tenuous to the outlandish:

What could it mean to “profane defecation”? Certainly not to regain a supposed naturalness, or simply to enjoy it as a perverse transgression (which is still better than nothing). Rather, it is a matter of archaeologically arriving at defecation as a field of polar tensions between nature and culture, private and public, singular and common. That is: to learn a new use for feces, just as babies tried to do in their way, before repression and separation intervened.5

Sade’s libertine consuming a woman’s excrement practices eroticism as transgression, in Bataille’s sense. But how can defecation be profaned beyond the threshold of transgression and renaturalization? Agamben’s “profanation” is meant to suspend the repression that a theological (or moral) dispositive has cast over things. The example he finds in nature is a cat playing:

The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse —just as the child plays with ancient religious symbols or objects that once belonged to the economic sphere— knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity… in vain. These behaviors are not effaced, but, thanks to the substitution of the yarn for the mouse…, deactivated and thus opened up for a new, possible use.6

Agamben sees compulsion or constraint behind every purpose; the profanation he proposes would liberate things into “means without ends.”

Agamben’s thesis of secularization blinds him to the particularity of a phenomenon that can no longer be traced back to religious practice and even stands opposed to it. It may well be that in a museum objects stand “at a remove,” as they do in a temple. However, musealization and exhibition are precisely what destroy their cult value and replace it with exhibition value. Likewise, tourism and pilgrimage stand in opposition to each other. Tourism creates “nonsites,” whereas pilgrimage is tied to places. According to Heidegger, the quality that makes human dwelling (Wohnen) possible is the “divine.” Such sites are constituted by history, memory, and identity. These same features are missing in the “non-sites” of tourism, where people pass by instead of lingering and spending time. Likewise, Agamben seeks to understand nakedness beyond the dispositive of theology — that is, “beyond the prestige of grace and the chimeras of corrupt nature.”7 He claims that exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to profane nudity:

It is this brazen-faced indifference that fashion models, porn stars, and others whose profession it is to show themselves must learn to acquire: they show nothing but the showing itself (that is, one’s own absolute mediality). In this way, the face is loaded until it bursts with exhibition-value. Yet, precisely through this nullification of expressivity, eroticism penetrates where it could have no place: the human face. […] Shown as a pure means beyond any concrete expressivity, it becomes available for a new use, a new form of erotic communication.8

However, nudity that is displayed without secrecy or expression approaches pornographic bareness. What is more, the pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery: “From one figure to the other, from seduction to love, then to desire, sexuality, finally to pure and simple porno; the farther you go, the closer you come to the lesser secret, the smaller enigma.”9 In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy. Contra Agamben, a face loaded with exhibition-value to the point of bursting promises no “new collective use of sexuality.”10 Indeed, exhibition destroys any and all possibilities for erotic communication. A naked face without mystery or expression —reduced simply to being on display— is obscene and pornographic. Capitalism is aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display. Knowing no other use for sexuality, it profanes eros — into porn. On this score, Agamben’s “profanation” amounts to just so much profanity.

This profanation is unfolding as deritualization and desacralization. Today, ritual spaces and actions are disappearing. The world is becoming more naked and more obscene. Bataille’s conception of “holy eroticism” still included ritualized communication: festivals and ceremonial games providing particularized sites, places at a remove. Today, love —inasmuch as it is supposed to amount only to warmth, intimacy, and pleasant arousal— points to the destruction of sacred eros. By the same token, pornography is eliminating erotic seduction, which toys with scenic illusion and deceptive appearances. Indeed, Baudrillard sets seduction in opposition to love: “Ritual is in the realm of seduction. Love is born from the destruction of ritual forms, from their liberation. Its energy is an energy of the dissolution of these forms.”11 Pornography completes the deritualization of love. Agamben’s profanation even promotes the deritualization and pornographication of the world in that it suspects ritual spaces of constituting compulsive forms of sequestration.

1. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phil Beitchmann (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008), 30.

2. Ibid., 53.

3. See Robert Pfaller, Das schmutzige Heilige und die reine Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008).

4. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007), 75.

5. Ibid., 86.

6. Ibid., 85.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 57.

8. Agamben, Profanations, 90.

9. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 137–138.

10. Agamben, Profanations, 91.

11. Ibid., 133.

The agony of eros 

 Byung-Chul Han