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SUSAN SONTAG
for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on
the
level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely
resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much, if not more,
than
it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. Everyone has felt
(at least in fantasy) the erotic glamor of physical cruelty and an
erotic lure in things which are vile and repulsive. These phenomena
are part of the genuine spectrum of sexuality, and if they are not to
be written off as mere neurotic aberrations, the picture may look
different from the one promoted by enlightened public opinion, and
less simple.
It almost seems as if it's for good reason that most people's whole
capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to them, given that each
person's sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, that may prove
amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again, it may
not. That most people do not regularly, or perhaps ever, experience
their sexual capacities at this unsettling pitch doesn't mean that the
extreme isn' t authentic, or that the possibility of it doesn't haunt
them anyway. (Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest
resource which human beings have available to them for blow–
ing their minds. Yet among the multitudes of the pious, the number
who have ventured very far with that state of consciousness must be
fairly small, too.) There is, demonstrably, something incorrectly
designed and potentially disorienting in the human sexual capacity–
at least in the capacities of man-in-civilization. Man, the sick animal,
bears within him an appetite which can drive him mad. And it's
that understanding of sexuality as something beyond good and evil,
beyond love, beyond sanity, sexuality as a resource for ordeal and
for breaking through limits of consciousness, that informs the French
books which I've been talking about.
The
Story of
0, with its project for completely transcending
the idea of personality, rests on this dark and complex vision of
sexuality-so far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by Ameri–
can Freudianism and liberal culture. The woman who is given no
other name than "0" progresses simultaneously toward her own
extinction as a human being and her fulfillment as a sexual being.
It's hard to know how anyone would ascertain whether there is truly
anything in "nature" or human consciousness that supports such
a split. But, surely, the possibility has always haunted man, as ac–
customed as he is to decrying such a split.
