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204 5 Porn and the N-Word Lust, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man, and a Derangement of Body and Sense(s) The ability to regard as an honor and a joy what society has declared to be an insult and a defilement bespeaks an agile mind—often one that loves learning for its own sake. —Samuel Delany, Phallos1 Porn and Praxis I have been attempting to develop an understanding of the qualities and abilities that become available through (or which themselves partially constitute) blackness-in/as-abjection. Yet the relation between blackness and abjection, while effected historically and in the present primarily by economic, military, and political means, is experientially lived, as a psychic reality and as a material reality, especially for the inheritors of the events that bring blackness into being, at that site and product of culture which is the nexus between psyche and body. We have been able to see this nexus and access to both it and its powers, represented textually in the metaphor of muscle tension, in a lynching scene and in narrative scenes of the sexual violation of black men. Courtesy of the French existential phenomenology on which Fanon relies, I have referred to at least one aspect of this nexus as anonymous or amorphous existence, and I have argued that it is accessible through existentially defined states of vertigo or anguish. This body-psyche nexus wherein the relation between blackness and abjection is experientially lived, and the various qualities it might be said to possess, enter representation, as I noted in the introduction, vexed by particular challenges: they do not so much defy or resist narrative as simply pose a problem for narrative machinery, because the marvelous fictions of I, self, linear temporality, or the coherent perspective on which narrative usually depends are in the state of abjection awash in those fictions’ opposites, Porn and the N-Word 205 their negations and what is in excess of them. I have argued that the (black) power I am attempting to reveal here is an experience of the bodypsyche nexus that gives to “‘significance’ a value which intellectualism withholds from it,” wherein an impression of self not-yet-ego takes some kind of form, and that this impression itself potentially offers corresponding impressions of human relations (and thus, culture and society):2 the synesthesia of a perceived pain and loss in abjection that is also felt or can become known as political possibility. In this final chapter I wish to traverse the difficulties narrative machinery encounters in blackness-in/as-abjection by visiting a kind of text that generically aims to work with (and to work) psychic-bodily responses: pornographic writing. Pornography (or erotica)3 as a genre of writing is meant at the very least to arouse the reader—arousal being a state of difficult -to-measure mixture between the physiological, the psychic, and the psychological; and porn is an intended impetus to masturbation, either while reading or in response to what one has read. Samuel R. Delany’s 1994 novel The Mad Man is, in his words, “a serious work of pornography. . . . Those who say it is not a pornographic work (and that I am being disingenuous by saying that it is) are, however wellintentioned , just wrong.”4 I do not reference this comment of Delany’s to defend his particular pornographic work or pornography itself against an all-too-customary dismissal of porn as a “low” cultural form without complexity;5 here I will assume, with admitted tendentiousness, that no such defense is required post-Foucault, and I take it as a given that even a work that everyone could agree was “only” about sex or solely intended to arouse sexually would not fail to warrant serious attention, since sex and sexual arousal are often entwined, often inextricably, with many if not all the elements of the worlds humans have made—so that, for example, it is certainly possible to read the ways sex informs politics even in its buttoned -down electoral form, just as electoral politics informs sex. I summon Delany’s authorial imprimatur here in order to underline how Delany’s novel works with the body-psyche nexus that I have been gesturing toward throughout this study, since the novel operates in the way that porn works with that nexus: in The Mad Man, a pornographic work, arousal and climax are achieved for The Mad Man’s protagonist— the protagonist being a position that functions as a prescribed point...

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