ON PORNOGRAPHY
199
of
Story of
0 is interested in the obliteration of personality from the
viewpoint of happiness. (The closest thing to a statement of this
theme we possess in English literature are certain passages in Law–
rence's
The Lost Girl.)
For the paradox to gain real significance, however, depends on
at least glimpsing a view of sex different from that held by most
. enlightened members of the community. The prevailing view-an
amalgam of Rousseauist, Freudian and liberal social thought-esti–
mates the phenomenon of sex as a perfectly intelligible although
uniquely precious source of emotional and physical pleasure. What
difficulties there are come from the long deformation of the sexual
impulses administered by Western Christianity, whose ugly wounds
. scarcely anyone in this culture escapes. First, guilt and anxiety. Then,
the reduction of sexual capacities leading if not to virtual impotence
or frigidity, at least to the depletion of erotic energy and the repres–
sion of many natural elements of sexual appetite (the "perversions") .
Then the spill-over into public dishonesties in which people tend to
respond to news of the sexual pleasures of others with envy, fascina–
tion, revulsion and spiteful indignation. It's from this pollution of
the sexual health of the culture that a phenomenon like pornography
is
derived.
Now, what's decisive in the complex of views held by most
educated members of the community is the assumption that human
sexual appetite is, if untampered with, a natural pleasant function;
and that "the obscene" is a convention, the fiction imposed upon
nature by a society convinced that there is something vile about the
sexual functions, and by extension, about sexual pleasure. It's just
these assumptions that are challenged by the French tradition repre–
sented by Sade, Lautreamont, Bataille and the authors of
Story of
0
and
The Image.
Their assumption seems to be that "the obscene" is
a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more
profound than the backwash of a sick society's aversion to the body.
Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, etc., a
highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially,
among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity.
Tamed
as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces
in
human consciousness- pushing us at intervals close to taboo and
dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden
arbitrary
violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning
