"You neither strip nor tease ... you parody ... I am a hoaxer: you give the impression of giving the naked truth, there could not be a greater hoax.
This is the opposite of life, because when she is nude, she has many more adornments than when she is dressed. Bodies are made up with extremely beautiful special, foundations, leaving the skin satin smooth ... She has gloves that cut off on her arms, which is always so beautiful, green, red or black stockings on her legs, also cut off at the thigh ...
Dream strip-tease: the space-woman. She was dancing in the void. Because the more slowly a woman dies, the more erotic it is. So I believe that this would reach its apex with a woman in a state of weightlessness.
Beach nudity has nothing to do with stage nudity. On stage the women are goddesses, they are untouchable ... The wave of nudity sweeping through the theatre and elsewhere is superficial, it is limited to a mental act: I am going to take my clothes off, I am going to show nude actors and actresses. Precisely these limits make it uninteresting. Other people present reality: here, I am only suggesting the impossible.
The reality of sex which is flaunted everywhere, diminishes the subjectivity of eroticism.
Iridescent under intense lights, embellished by a voluminous orange wig, the whole thing set off with jewels, Usha Barock, an Austrian-Polish half-caste, will continue the tradition of the Crazy Horse: creating what you cannot hold in your arms."
The strip-tease is a dance, perhaps the only one, and definitely the most original in the contemporary Western world. Its secret is a woman's autoerotic celebration of her own body, which becomes desirable in exact proportion to the intensity of this celebration. Without this narcissistic mirage that is the substance of every gesture, without this gestural repertoire of caresses that come to envelop the body, making it into an emblem as a phallic object, there would be no erotic effect. A sublime masturbation whose slow pace, as Bernardin said, is fundamental. This slow pace marks the fact that the gestures with which the girl covers herself (stripping, caressing, even as far as mimicking orgasm [jouissance]), come from 'the other'. Her gestures weave a phantom sexual partner around her. By the same token, however, the other is excluded, since she replaces it and appropriates its gestures for herself following a work of condensation which is not in fact far removed from dream-processes. The whole erotic secret (and labour) of the strip lies in this evocation and revocation of the other, through gestures so slow as to be poetic, as is slow motion film of explosions or falls, because something in this, before being completed, has time to pass you by, which, if such a thing exists, constitutes the perfection of desire. [9]
The only good strip is the one that reflects the body in the mirror of gestures and follows this rigorous narcissistic abstraction: the gestural repertoire being the mobile equivalent of the panoply of signs and marks at work in situations such as erectile stagings of the body at every level of fashion, make-up and advertising.[10] The bad strip is obviously a pure undressing, which simply restores a state of nudity, the alleged finality of the spectacle, lacking any hypnosis of the body, in order to give it directly over to the audience's lusts. It is not that the bad strip is unable to capture the audience's desire on the contrary but because the girl was unable to recreate her body as an object for herself,because she was unable to effect this transubstantiation of profane (realist, naturalist) nudity into sacred nudity, where a body describes its own contours, feels itself (but always across a kind of subtle void, a sensual distance, of a circumlocution which, once again, as in the dream, reflects the fact that gestures are like a mirror, that the body is turned back on itself by this mirror of gestures). The bad strip is threatened by nudity or immobility (or the absence of 'rhythm', the awkward gesture): all that remains on the stage is a woman and an 'obscene' (in the strict sense of the term) body, rather than the closed sphere of a body which, by means of this aura of gestures, design(ate)s itself as a phallus and specifies itself as a sign of desire. To succeed is not at all to 'make love with the audience' as is generally thought, it is rather precisely the opposite. The stripper is a goddess according to Bernardin, and the prohibition cast over her, which she traces around herself, does not signify that you cannot take anything from her (cannot pass into sexual acting-out, this repressive situation belongs to the bad strip), but rather that you cannot give her anything, because she gives herself everything, hence the complete transcendence that makes her fascinating.
The slow pace of the gestures comes from the priesthood and from transubstantiation. Not bread and wine in this case, but the transubstantiation of the body into the phallus. Every piece of clothing that falls brings her no closer to nudity, to the naked 'truth' of sex (although the entire spectacle is also fuelled by the voyeuristic drive, haunted by a violent laying bare and the rape-drive, but these phantasms run counter to the spectacle). As her clothes fall, she design(ate)s what she strips down as a phallus she unveils herself-as-other and the same game becomes profound, the body emerging more and more as a phallic effigy to the rhythm of the strip. This is not then a game of stripping signs away in order to reveal a sexual 'depth', but, on the contrary, an ascending play of the construction of signs each mark deriving an erotic force by means of its labour as a sign, that is, by means of the reversal it effects of what has never been (loss and castration) into what it design(ate)s instead to take its place: the phallus. [11] This is why the strip-tease is slow: it ought to go as fast as possible if it is simply a matter of preparing for sex. It is slow because it is discourse, the construction of signs, the meticulous elaboration of deferred meaning. The gaze too testifies to this phallic transfiguration. A fixed gaze is an essential asset of the good stripper. This is commonly interpreted as a distantiation technique, a coolness intended to mark the limits of this erotic situation. Yes and no: the fixed gaze that merely marks a prohibition would once more turn the strip into a kind of repressive pornodrama. That is not a good strip, the mastery of the gaze has nothing to do with a willed 'cool': if it is cool, as with mannequins, it is on condition that cool is redefined as a very specific quality of the whole contemporary media and body culture, and no longer belongs to the order of the hot and the cold. This gaze is the neutralised gaze of auto-erotic fascination, of the woman-object gazing at herself with her eyes wide open, then closing her eyes on herself. This is not the effect of desire undergoing censorship, it is the peak of perfection and perversion. It is the fulfilment of the entire sexual system that has it that a woman is never more completely herself, and therefore never so seductive, as when she accepts giving herself pleasure first of all, taking pleasure in herself, having no other desire or transcendence than that of her own image.
The ideal body, as outlined in this statute, is that of the mannequin. The mannequin offers the model of every phallic instrumentalisation of the body. The word itself states this: manne-ken, 'little man', the child or the penis. The woman wraps her own body in a sophisticated manipulation, a flawless and intense narcissistic discipline, which effectively makes it the paradigm of seduction. And doubtless it is here, in this perverse process that turns her and her sacralised body into a living phallus, that we find the real castration of woman (also of man, but according to a model which tends to crystallise around the woman). To be castrated is to be covered with phallic substitutes. The woman is covered in them, she is summoned to produce a phallus from her body, on pain of perhaps not being desirable. And if women are not fetishists it is because they perform this labour of continual fetishisation on themselves, they become dolls. We know that the doll is a fetish produced in order to be continually dressed and undressed, dressed up and dressed down. It is this play of covering and uncovering that gives the doll its childhood symbolic value, it is in this play, conversely, that every object- and symbolic relation regresses when the woman turns herself into a doll, becomes her own fetish and the fetish of the other. [12] As Freud says: 'pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallise the last moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic ('Fetishism', in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p. 155).
Thus the fascination of the strip-tease as a spectacle of castration derives from the immanence of discovering, or rather seeking and never managing to discover, or better still searching by all available means without ever discovering, that there is nothing there. 'An aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelibile of the repression that has taken place' (ibid., p. 154). The experience of this unthinkable absence, which subsequently remains constitutive of every 'revelation', every 'unveiling' (and in particular the sexual status of 'truth'), the obsession with the hole is changed into the converse fascination with the phallus. From this mystery of the denied, barred, gaping void, a whole population of fetishes surges forth (objects, phantasms, body-objects). The fetishised woman's body itself comes to bar the point of absence from which it arose, it comes to bar this vertigo in all its erotic presence, a 'token of a triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it' (ibid., p. 154).
There is nothing behind this succession of veils, there never has been, and the impulse which is always pressing forward in order to discover this is strictly speaking the process of castration; not the recognition of lack, but the fascinating vertigo of this nihilating substance. The entire march of the West, ending in a vertiginous compulsion for realism, is affected by this myopia of castration. Pretending to restore the 'ground of things', we unconsciously 'eye up' the void. Instead of a recognition of castration, we establish all kinds of phallic alibis; then, following a fascinated compulsion, we seek to dismiss these alibis one by one in order to uncover the 'truth', which is always castration, but which is in the last instance always revealed to be castration denied.
9. The gestural narrative, or, technically speaking, the 'bump and grind', realises here what Bataille called the 'ruse of opposition' [feinte du contraire]: because it is continuously covered and concealed by the same gestures that denude it, the body here acquires its poetic meaning by force of ambivalence. On the other hand, we see how naïve nudists and others are, their 'superficial beach nudity' that Bernardin speaks of, who believe they are laying reality entirely bare and fall into the equivalence of the sign: reality is nothing more than the equivalent signifier to a natural signified. This naturalist unveiling is only ever a 'mental act', as Bernardin put it so well, it is an ideology. In this sense the strip, through its perverse play and its sophisticated ambivalence, is as opposed to 'liberation through nudity' as it is to a liberal-rationalist ideology. The 'escalation of the nude' is the escalation of rationalism, the rights of man, formal liberation, liberal demagogy, and petty-bourgeois free-thinking. This realistic aberration was put perfectly back into its place by a little girl's words when she was offered a doll that pisses: 'My little sister can do that too. Couldn't you give me a real one?'
10. A play of transparent veils can play the same role as this play of gestures. Advertising is of the same order when it frequently puts two or several women on stage. It is only in appearance that this is a homosexual thematic, since it is in fact a variant of the narcissistic model of self-seduction, a play of reduplications centred on the self by means of the detour of a sexual simulation (which may be homosexual besides: there are only ever men in advertising to act as a narcissistic warning, to help the woman to take pleasure in herself).
11. Even when the last piece of clothing falls away, the integral strip does not alter its logic. We know that gestures are enough to trace an enchanted line around the body, a much more subtle marker than panties. In any case, it is not a sexual organ that this structural marker (panties or gesture) bars, but the very sexualisation that crosses the body: the spectacle of the organ and, at the limit, of the orgasm do not therefore eliminate this at all.
12. The perverse desire is the normal desire imposed by the social model. If the woman avoids auto-erotic regression, she is no longer an object of desire, she becomes a subject of desire, and thereby resistant to the structure of the perverse desire. But she too could very well seek to fulfil her desire in the fetishistic neutralisation of the desire of the other, so that the perverse structure (that kind of division of the labour of desire between the subject and the object which is the secret of perversion and its erotic yield) remains unchanged. The only alternative is that everyone should break down this phallic fortress and open up the perverse structure which surrounds the sexual system; instead of fixing their eyes on a phallic identity, on its absence in the place of the other, leave the white magic of phallic identification in order to recognise their own perilous ambivalence, so that the play of desire as symbolic exchange becomes possible once more.
-- Edited by fidaner on Monday 7th of December 2015 01:31:35 PM
-- Edited by fidaner on Monday 7th of December 2015 01:32:47 PM
-- Edited by fidaner on Monday 7th of December 2015 01:42:07 PM
