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What Is There? A Dialogue on Obscenity, Sexuality, and the Sublime Q: You suggested that we call this interview, “What Is There?” What is this all about? We are supposed to be talking about sexuality and the sublime, but I don’t see the connection. A: Sexuality and the sublime are, of course, fashionable topics today. They seem to be talked about in the same breath. In this sense, it is natural to bring them together. What I want to suggest, however, is that we don’t have to work hard to bring them together, because they are already joined at the hip. The question “What is there?” is a heuristic device useful to uncover the hidden connections between sexuality and the sublime. It shows, ‹rst and foremost, that they are connected by the concept of obscenity. Modern thought is preoccupied with obscenity. Q: Any time an academic mentions a word like obscene, you can be fairly sure that he or she is going to twist its meaning. A: You’re right, so let me pull out my hyphen fast and insert it. What I am calling the ob-scene is the preoccupation in modern and postmodern thought with the duplicity of interpretation, that any word, object, or subject may take additional or contradictory meaning from another context, another scene, an ob-scene, because of the force of desire. This mode of thought is most obviously derived from Freud and Heidegger, and a whole slew of terms conceals the same interpretive preoccupations: indeterminacy, ideology, bad faith, kitsch, diff érance, uncanniness, and so forth. The sublime ‹ts here, and so does sexual desire, especially when it is used in the dynamic sense found in Lacan and others. In Foucault, for example, sex is the term that is and is not itself; otherwise he wouldn’t be able to talk about the discourse of sex repressing sex. I start with the question “What is there?” because it shows to what extent the marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis and Heideggerian existentialism is a facility of modern thought. Most philosophical exercises in the Continental tradition acknowledge and build upon 95 5 their in›uence. What has not been acknowledged is that these exercises are ob-scene. But I would say, in the ‹nal analysis, that the hyphen doesn’t matter . There is something obscene in these kinds of philosophical exercises because they seem less concerned with meaning than desire. The effect is obvious in the palpable delight that people take in them, the sensual relish with which they ‹nger the conundrums and their speci‹c textual manifestations, and in the enjoyment they take in giving and taking away meaning. The main question about obscenity concerns how, why, and whether what is there is obscene. This question can’t be answered to anyone’s satisfaction, however—and satisfaction is worth stressing here—because obscenity is about the sexual pleasure experienced in the giving and taking away of meaning. For example, obscenity is often described in terms of the attempt to denature the sexual act, to make it something else, something progressively different from what it should be. Vicissitudes of the instincts are pursued. Bodies are encrusted with fetishes. But, in fact, even the most common sexual act is viewed as obscene, as if seen through other eyes, when it is moved to a different context. Often the medium, whether written, plastic, or photographic, is held responsible for the obscenity, as if representation itself created the problem. Fredric Jameson, for example, goes so far as to say that “the visual is essentially pornographic” (1992, 1). This is an overreaction because it is not the presence of representation that makes sexual or other actions obscene. It is a matter of desire and its power to transform meanings and contexts. Obscenity appears when desire gets out of hand. Desire transforms actions, objects, and subjects, so that they are rendered beside themselves. Q: Perhaps you had better run through this. It’s fairly obvious that Continental philosophy owes a lot to Freud and Heidegger. But where does obscenity come into it? A: Consider the question for a moment. “What is there?” is, ‹rst of all, a fundamental metaphysical question in the Heideggerian sense. Heidegger de‹nes metaphysics as a desire for knowledge that exceeds the realm of physics and surpasses understanding as that mental faculty most concerned with the object world, thus setting into motion the faculty of pure reason. “What is there?” is a variation on the Heideggerian question...

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