[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

The Body ‘Prefers Not To’

Nietzsche on Ethereal Run in Melville and Acker

Page II

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Kathy Acker’s story thematizes some of the same concerns with subjectivity, a body which refuses to embody subjectivity, and a desire for ethereal immortality. A female, yet unnamed, narrator begins to narrate a moment in her life associated with the inevitable pain following an abortion. This pain is however suspended insofar as the event takes place in a dream.

I got married when I was very young. I did not know my husband...
The day after our wedding, I had a dream about the world:
At the entrance to the world, I was about to have an abortion.
I had had abortions before this.
I had to decide whether or not I wanted an anaesthetic. I guess that the doctor
had asked me, but I don't remember that anyone was there. Thinking, I asked
how much the abortion was going to hurt me. The doctor replied, “Oh,
there'll be pain...” in a voice that was trying to dismiss such pain. Since I
knew that that type of voice meant that there would be a lot of pain, I
chickened out. The blanket that was lying on top of me was yellow. I hate
pain. I decided on anaesthetic.
All through the abortion, I was kind of conscious. While I was in this
consciousness, a pillow, which was around my ass, inflated and I floated
three feet up above the cot.
After the abortion, my body was OK, so I left the hospital.
This was the scene of my marriage. (Acker, 1992: URL)

This passage sets the tone for the way in which the narrator shifts between narrative moments. One is tempted to say here: thus spoke Nietzsche:—pain is the true metaphysical reality—insofar as Acker can be said to subversively re-interpret Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. If pain, for Nietzsche, is the most powerful aid to mnemonics, as well as the main condition of all forms of creation, for Acker, pain is the experience of a metaphysical dream. If, for Nietzsche, pain reflects the burden of biological existence, for Acker pain is linked to the annihilation of existence, to death. In dreams, our metaphysical reality is transformed into metaphysical illusion, a form of death that is not final but delayed by the presence of ghosts. In Acker’s first dream—which specifies moments of which the narrator is conscious and hence can relate in a coherent way—we also find other dreams recounted either as they occur, simultaneous with the moment of telling, or as they are retold in hindsight. The simultaneity of narration at this second level is marked through direct speech and dialogue (usually between the narrator and her husband, Steven). The dialogue in turn launches other dreams, which are then retold. These dreams follow both conscious and unconscious patterns and are the expression of fragmented feelings. What the narrator is interested in is the extent to which she can formulate what the body feels independent of cognitive subjectivity. As the “I” of the narrator deliberately situates itself outside reality—events take place in a virtual space—what the “I” embodies—the dream—becomes an object subjected to an autonomous sphere of knowledge. In other words, when, what, how, and if the body knows, the narrator will tell. This structure is followed by a “Masturbation Journal” in which the narrator provides entries for three days. So, the dreams are not only about telling and retelling stories, but also about writing. Just before the journal entries the narrator assesses her own position in relation to the stories told and in relation to her husband, who always wants to know how they end. Writing is thus anticipated by a call on the language of the body to disclose its secrets. Writes Acker:

I’ve begun a journey to make sex live, to find the relation between language and the body rather than this sexuality that’s presented by society as diseased.
My body seems to reject ordinary language.
If I can find the language of the body, I can find where sex is lying. While I masturbate, I’ll try to hear the language that’s there. (URL)

The narrator’s approach to searching for the language of the body so that she can locate sex points to the necessity of channeling experience through a singular moment that dissolves form (or rather the faith in grammar). This can be seen in the way in which the journal entries are put together, both at the level of form and content. The entry for “Day 1” begins with a sentence in parenthesis: “(This might not make any sense)” and is followed by a couple of other lines emphasizing movement and expectation. These lines have a performative character insofar as they lead straight into another sentence which can be read as a comment on movement and expectation: “there is nothing: it is here that language enters.” “Day 2” begins with this line: “It starts with bodily irritation, but then one has to forget the body, leave the body, leave the body until the body quivers uncontrollably.” While the body is here rendered incalculable, it is also seen as a space with levels, but no dialectic. In its singular existence, the body does not belong to the text; rather it belongs to a textual multiplicity. In cyberspace the body is all about networking and regeneration, rather than system and reproduction (Haraway). This interconnectedness is what enables the narrator to offer descriptive images of some levels of the body. Likening the body to a room, she states:

In this room, everything hangs out: nipples scrape against air; buttocks thrust out so that the asshole is open, and all that was inside is now outside now it starts. it: actual touching. This is the beginning of feeling. (URL)

The beginning of feeling is also marked by multiple choices. This is illustrated in one of the lines in the journal entry for “Day 3,” which states: “While crossing the threshold, language is forbidden; having crossed, it’s possible to have language.” The threshold here can be seen as Félix Guattari’s threshold of irreversibility. Guattari plays in an interesting way with some of the signifieds of the signifier threshold in his Chaosmosis (1995): liminality (limen = threshold), but also margin, outskirt, here in the sense of being cut off by interruption. One could say that precepts and affects are outside the notion of having “faith in grammar” insofar as they are not bound up with any preconceived subjective content or objective form. They are characterized by a singularly liminal quality, insofar as they are able to cross thresholds and map potentialities of both, death and existence. Says Guattari: “There is an ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible, an ethics and politics of the virtual that decorporealizes and deterritorializes contingency, linear causality, and the pressure of circumstances and significations which besiege us. It is a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingularization” (Guattari, 1995: 29). Once the crossing over is done, what is left behind is only the essence of the articulating/or silent body. Whichever we prefer.

One of the passages in Acker’s text that more clearly takes the question of ethereal immortality into account is the dream in which the narrator, her husband and two other women, one of them a countess, discuss the other two Hungarian countesses: Klara and her niece Ezebeth Bathory. These two 16th century historical figures have entered our cultural consciousness alongside characters such as Dracula and other vampires.

“Klara Bathory had married four husbands in succession. She had murdered
the first two. Afterwards, she took a lover who was much younger than her...”
Steven returned.
“She smothered the boy in castles. Then, a pasha captured him; while the
former was skewering and roasting him on a spit, the entire garrison raped
Klara. They cut through the throat of the woman who was still living.
“It is a violent society.”
“Klara's niece was Ezebeth Bathory, more well known as The Scarlet Witch.”
“She murdered almost 610 young women,” her secretary added.
“Yes, she kidnapped young girls in order to get their blood.”
“No.”
“She hung them up by their wrists, then whipped them until their tortured flesh
was torn to shreds.” My husband spoke for the first time.
He, the Countess, and her friend were sitting together on a small sofa. I was
perching on an armchair.
“Oh yes, and she clipped their fingers off with shears,”—the Countess.
“Pierced their nipples with needles, yes, then tore out the tips with silver
pincers,” my husband.
“Because human blood is an elixir,”—the Countess.
“...she bit them everywhere and pushed red hot pokers right into their
faces...”—my husband.
“No!”
“And with the curses of witches...,” said the young girl,
“And with the curses of witches, especially the sorceress Darvulia Anna, cut
off pieces of their flesh, grilled them, then made them eat parts of their own
bodies,”
“Go on go on go on.”—the girl.
“Kissed their veins with rusty nails,”—the woman whom I had desired.
“Go on go on go on,”—her lover
“...and when the young girls parted their lips in order to screech, she plunged
the flaming rod into the caverns of the throats...” my husband began taking
over...”
“No!”
“Your wife is very much in love with you, isn't she?” the countess asked him.
“How does the story end?” my husband replied. (URL)

While the narrator takes active part in the telling of this story based on the practice of Ezebeth Bathory who bathed in the blood of young virgins so that she could stay young and alive (a practice which Acker only alludes to), she also indicates at the end of the story that she feels this and other stories are all being talked to death. By exclaiming that she doesn’t want sexuality, she articulates a preference for precisely that stage where the body enters a relation with what it prefers not: to be vampirized by language. In a parallel that recalls Nietzsche, it is interesting to note that in the 1962 film The Slaughter of the Vampires (directed by Roberto Mauri) the role of Bram Stoker’s protagonist Professor van Helsing is here replaced by a Professor Nietzsche. This suggests a catachrestic relation between annihilating the vampire’s eternal recurrence by using a hammer and the real Nietzsche’s notion of philosophizing with the same weapon; for the latter the vampire even has a name, Spinoza, as we are informed in The Gay Science (372). In a cultural studies context we can further observe that Nietzsche’s proclamation: “God is dead” is often echoed in pronouncements such as “Dracula is dead” (The Brides of Dracula, 1960), thus suggesting the irony in having the immortal overcome by the mortal.

As Acker’s story ends with someone named Rodney waiting for her “beyond a door marked by a black O,”,(1) which is also the last line in her story, it is clear that what the body prefers not to is also to continue being a body in any real sense. If we were to paraphrase one of Nietzsche’s most condensed and charged maxims: “Man is something to be overcome,” we could say that the body, in both Melville and Acker is also something to be Overcome. What is further suggested in Acker’s story is that in order for Rodney to be able to wait, the narrator would have to hold a promise that potentially she will cross over through the hole, suggested by the letter O. This roundness which we also find in Bartleby, when the narrator makes a consideration of his former employer’s name, John Jacob Astor,(2) is the name Acker gives to her objective: to become immortal by placing her body in care of the ghost in the dream machine. The “Ah” in Melville and the “O” in Acker each constitute moments of singular expressions that eradicate language structures by undoing the NO, or O. (Nietzsche nods).

References

Acker, Kathy (1992) “The Language Of The Body.” CTheory.net. Eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. [http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=1].

Agamben, Giorgio (1999) “Bartleby, or On Contingency.” Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ahern, Daniel (1995) Nietzsche as Cultural Physician. Pittsburgh: Penn State University Press.

Benesch, Klaus (2002) Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Copjec, Joan (2002) Imagine there’s no woman. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.

Evens, Aden (2006) “Object-Oriented Ontology, or Programming’s Creative Fold.” Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 2. Nr. 1. April.

Gasset, Ortega y, J. (2002) Toward a Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethicoaesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Haraway, Donna (1991) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge.

Hegel, F. W. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. I (Aesthetics). Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray (2005). TechnoLogics: ghosts, the incalculable, and the suspension of animation. Albany: SUNY.

Melville, Herman (1853) “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.“ [http://www.bartleby.com/129].

Mules, Warwick (2006) “Creativity, Singularity and Techne: the making and unmaking of visual objects in modernity.” Angelaki. Journal of Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 2. Nr. 1. April.

Nietzsche, F. (1966) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo. How one becomes what one is. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1984) Thus spoke Zarathustra. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 103-439.

Nietzsche, F. (1984b) From: The Gay Science. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 93-102.

Nietzsche, F. (1984c) Twilight of the Idols. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 463-563.

Olivier, Bert (2007) “Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence.” South African Journal of Philosophy. 26 (1).

Notes

(1) This may be a reference to Histoire d'O which was a controversial erotic novel published in 1954 about sadomasochism by Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage. The novel has been accused of representing women in an ultimately objectified position.

(2) “The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion” (URL).

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | The Body ‘Prefers Not To.’

Camelia Elias’s personal web site can be found at http://www.akira.ruc.dk/~camelia/.

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