LEO BERSANI
451
they also encourage us to cultivate. A discussion of contemporary theaters
of
d~sire~obviously
beyond our purpose here-would have to look closely
at the consequences of all serious enterprises of psychic deconstruction. For
among those consequences, we inevitably find, to
some
degree, the porno–
graphic tyrannies intrinsic to all desire.
I might indicate , in conclusion, what I mean by this last remark. Desire
is an hallucinated satisfaction in the absence of the source of satisfaction.
In other words, it is an appetite of the imagination ; and the infant, as Freud
described him, is already an artist of sorts in the sense that he invents and is
excited by imaginary equivalents of remembered satisfactions. The activity
of desiring is inseparable from the activity of fantasizing. The brutality of
desire has
to
do with its solipsistic nature: the world it conjures up is respon–
sible only
to
a personal formula for satisfaction. In a sense, the ideal context
for triumphant desire is masturbation. Melanie Klein emphasized the
importance of masturbatory fantasies in determining the forms taken by
children's playas well as by their later sublimations. And in the writing of
Jean Genet, whose Kleinian insights matured far from the analytic couch,
we
see
a striking confirmation of the continuities between fantasies of desire ,
fantasies of omnipotence, and the fantasies of literature. The paradoxical
nature of desire is that it is simultaneously the experience of a lack and of
omnipotence: we yearn for what we don't have in fantasies which provide
us with ideal (both perfect and insubstantial) possessions of what we don ' t
have. In pornographic literature , characters
use
one another's bodies with
the same freedom from any constraining resistances or consequences as the
fantasies of " pure" desire
use
the world. The cruelty and destructiveness in
such literature can perhaps be explained in two ways: they are metaphors
for the tendency in desiring fantasy to negate real objects and bodies and
to
replace them with imaginary objects and bodies, and they may also ex–
press a rage against the world (and against one's own body) which results
from frustrated desire-that is, desire compelled to recognize itself
as
imaginary.
It
is perhaps the role of sublimation, conscience, and character-forma–
tion to modify what
seems
to
be
the potentially limitless aggressiveness of
desire. This aggressiveness
seems
to
be
a primary source of anxiety. To live
in time is an apprenticeship in techniques for deflecting desire into activities
and a personality which are socially viable. Literature is instructive in this
respect: scenes of desire in literary works are surrounded by and submitted
to
developments
which both compromise and humanize desire. On the
one hand, literature hallucinates the world in order to accommodate desire .
On the other hand, it illustrates the ways in which we learn, in time, to
make what Melanie Klein called reparations
to
the world for our imaginary
