Sexuality and Aesthetics

Author(s): Leo Bersani

Source: October , Spring, 1984, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis
(Spring, 1984), pp. 27-42
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/778462

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics

LEO BERSANI

Does sexuality exist? And if it exists, what is its relation- if indee

one-to sex?
These questions have recently been raised by Michel Foucau
primarily, however, with the intention, or the hope, of answering
rather in order to define the strategic benefits derived from the f
them, from the creation of sex and sexuality as categories of nature
of culture. "If sexuality," Michel Foucault writes in the first vo
History of Sexuality, "was constituted as an area of investigation, t
because relations of power had established it as a possible object.
uality is the name given not to some hidden or profound human
rather to a historical construct [un dispositif historique] organized
strategies of knowledge and power. But if, for the past two hundred
"sex has not ceased to provoke a kind of generalized discursive ereth
advertised secrets of sex are by no means the big prize in the powe
game. "In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led
the question of what we are, to sex."3 That is, what Foucault calls t
of sexuality and of sex is, in a sense, nothing more than the strategi
tation of a more fundamental effort to control the definition of the hum
Thus the gradual de-emphasis in Foucault's work of specific socia
of domination and discipline, and a certain generalizing of the
sexuality into a "genealogy of the subject in Western societies." The
fundamental exercise of power over individuals is their own confes
pretation of themselves. A study of the power-knowledge network
fore lead to a dismantling analysis of "the technologies of the self."
What is the position of Freud, and of psychoanalysis, in the
these technologies? Foucault reminds us how little Freud innova

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, N

theon, 1978, p. 98.
2. Ibid., p. 32.
3. Ibid., p. 78.

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 28 OCTOBER

aspects of psy
of a normativ
exposure of t
already laid o
Freud should
credited wit
wonderfully
fathers and d
secular injunc
petus" is, ho
from the poin
vasive, and th
knowledge an
may have dest
attempt to m
epistemology.
to our confes
trophe: I mea
human subje
precedented s
"Nearly colla
the efficiency
suppression o
ment, a supp
contributed. I
beneficent d
stammering-
sexuality can
our reading o
treatise on hu
first essay-w
exhibitionism
different way
rations; they
certain histor
uality. This p
the "stages" o
ment in Freud
Essays was ad
organization (the sadistic-anal phase) in the 1913 paper on "The Predisposition

4. Ibid., p. 159.

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics 29

to Obsessional Neurosis"; the "oral

the 1915 addition to the Three Ess
organization is added to the other
children appears to have had little
tells us, were inferred from the a
logically disturbed. The clinical "ve
will thus inevitably be guided by a
But if the reality of those ph
therefore somewhat problematic
human sexuality is immeasurabl
not only as belonging to childhoo
sexual regime of a sort," they
themselves to be "abortive begi
organization of the component i
genitality is the hierarchical sta
And the perversions of adults ther
completed narratives.
But this narrative of sexual dev
section of Freud's third essay is a
the nature of sexual pleasure and
goal of sexuality turns out to be d
genital orgasm, Freud writes, "is
differs from that of the earlie
discharge: it is wholly a pleasure o
libido is for the time being ext
criticism to which Freud's econ
(especially during the last twenty
portant to note that in the Three
pleasure of discharge or released t
Freud does make a distinction bet
due to the excitation of erotogeni
to the discharge of the sexual s
familiar one, but what has perhap
problematic exception is the wo
pleasures do, after all, exist ind
title of Freud's third essay -"the
between fore- and end-pleasure re

5. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the The

Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey
Analysis. Vol. VII, pp. 197-198. All subse
text.

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 30 OCTOBER

ontologies of
of knowing
sexuality" (p
factorily the
confession o
sexuality. In
tween satisf
the extinctio
could also be
psychoanalys
as if infantil
ably prepara
sexuality.
Indeed, things are quite different-and much more problematic-when
Freud tries to define the pleasure of the erotogenic zones. "The fact," Freud
writes, "that sexual excitement possesses the character of tension raises a prob-
lem the solution of which is no less difficult than it would be important in help-
ing us to understand the sexual processes." The "problem" arises from Freud's
insistence, "in spite of all the differences of opinion that reign on the subject
among psychologists, . . . that a feeling of tension necessarily involves
unpleasure." The "decisive" fact here, Freud goes on, is that such feelings are
"accompanied by an impulsion to make a change in the psychological situa-
tion"; they operate, that is to say, "in an urgent way which is wholly alien to the
nature of the feeling of pleasure." And yet sexual excitement "is also undoubt-
edly felt as pleasurable" (p. 209). How, Freud asks, can unpleasurable tension
and pleasure be reconciled?
Not only is sexuality characterized by the simultaneous production of
pleasure and of unpleasurable tension; perhaps even more bizarre is the fact
that the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual stimulation seeks not to be
released, but to be increased! Generally, Freud tends to speak of sexual excite-
ment as if it were something like an itch, or an urge to sneeze. But in sex
preceding discharge, the analogy with the itch no longer holds. We scratch,
after all, in order to remove an itch, but - to hold on one more moment to the
analogy - now we are confronted with an itch that seeks nothing more than its
own prolongation, even its own intensification. If, Freud writes, you touch the
skin of an unexcited woman's breast, the contact will produce a pleasurable
feeling that "arouses a sexual excitation that demands an increase of pleasure"
(p. 210). The problem is in understanding "how it can come about that an ex-
perience of pleasure can give rise to a need for greater pleasure." The same
question is phrased more sharply in the second of the Three Essays, when, in his
discussion of infantile sexuality, Freud admits to finding it "somewhat strange"
that "in order to remove one stimulus, it seems necessary to adduce a second
one at the same time spot" (p. 185). How are we to understand this exceptional

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sexuality and Aesthetics 31

way of dealing with stimuli, as

unpleasurable tension? What wo
somehow distinct from satisfac
difficulty nothing more than a
more exactly, are the difficulti
dysfunctional relation of our la
One thing is certain: fifteen ye
is already considering a problem
mysterious repetition (and even
explicitly seen as inherent in se
gesting that beyond the pleasur
repetition--or what could perh
Freud's attempts to define the s
be inscribed in the very act of
the "essence" of sexuality, bu
pleasurable unpleasure, or the
pleasure, or to remove a stimulu
end of these attempted replic
threatened by Freud's famous r
refinding of it" (p. 222). Those o
of infantile sexuality, who m
drives of orality and anality to
we are lucky in our objects! - ba
"A child sucking at his mother's
tion of love." The end of the st
teleological movement goes into
goal; and the narrative line of s
To refind an object naturall
nothing is less certain in Freud
remain so remarkably faithfu
nature of sexuality in Freud; h
turning back to itself ("le temps d
drotique"). Freud, in a discussion
attaches itself to functions serv
makes it clear that the mother'
her milk, is merely the acciden
erotogenic zone. In this view, th
be much less important than th
lating the lips in the same way.
Freud adds, its big toe; and thos
erotogenic significance will beco
perverse kissing [the allusion, I
kiss], or, if males, will have a

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 32 OCTOBER

(p. 182). The

and Freud in
order to mak
pleasure. The
siderably dim
can't kiss my
The ambigu
object in the
tion about h
sexual life. F
volve other
hood as indep
ual activity.
Three Essays
opment and
ences which
same passag
"Children w
playmates us
ual activity a
infantile sex
auto-eroticis
footnote in
Pleasure Prin
of the instin
and to place
the hesitatio
anticipatory
Pleasure Prin
he himself a
destructiven
then, more
derives from
of the individual and civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents. But in the
Three Essays, Freud clearly places cruelty - more specifically, sadism a
masochism- at the heart of infantile sexuality. His hesitation, interesting
enough, has to do with the exact location of cruelty in sexuality. Is it a comp
nent instinct? Is it distinct from or independent of sexual activities attached
the erotogenic zones? And if it is independent of those activities, what are t
"mutual influences" which somehow connect cruelty to sexual development?
If Freud has difficulty placing what he at first thought of as the sexual
aberration of sado-masochism, it is perhaps because of the unnoticed, and cer
tainly unwanted, conclusion toward which his investigation might have

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sexuality and Aesthetics 33

him. Could it be that this except

constitutes its elusive "essence"-
sexuality's emergence? I have refer
purpose of the Three Essays in the
of the biological processes consti
construct from our fragmentary
standing alike of normal and of pa
clusion is reached; it is even rath
unnoticed it is because it risks diss
"It is easy to establish," Freud writ
uality, "that all comparatively inte
fying ones, trench upon sexuality [
And two pages later: "It may well
can occur in the organism without
tion of the sexual instinct." Almos
examples in this section clearly s
strain, verbal disputes, wrestling w
this idea is repeated in the concl
Freud speaks of sexual excitemen
processes that occur in the organis
intensity, and most especially," he
even though it is of a distressing
In passages such as these, Freu
tion that the pleasurable unpleas
when the body's "normal" range
organization of the self is moment
cesses somehow "beyond" those c
activity, modification of the organ
capable of becoming the source of
excitement at the point at which t
produced."6 Sexuality would be tha
From this perspective, the distingu
tibility to the sexual. The polymor
would be a function of the child
uality. Sexuality is a particularly h
genesis may depend on the dicala
tities of stimuli to which we are e
capable of resisting or, in Freudian
of sexuality is that we seek not onl

6. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psy

London, The Johns Hopkins University

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
34 OCTOBER

to repeat, ev
need to find
not cruelty
forms of th
seeking out
would som
which it is
I wish to pr
only because
organism su
developmen
ment ago. M
biologically
sexuality al
already mak
ing merely
an evolutiona
Thus along
different ar
ond argume
subject to b
massive det
specificity.
it would see
that the exp
of human l
that biology
by," or "pic
sciousness o
But Freud a
control thi
distinct fro
is a kind of
undeveloped
The ontolog
manifests it
sexual acts, b
tween two a
master, and
fondled silv
the teleolog
sexuality a
object-specif

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics 35

body's existence. The phases of i

complex give a narrative intellig
speak, by knots of tautological a
way, the ego will domesticate, str
ment which simultaneously end
human life. That process is descri
corpore freudiano - of psychoanaly

In what ways could it be shown

ontology of sexuality which I hav
sipates our potentially savage sexu
as a perpetuation and replicative
Or, in other terms, how may we
ing of the human subject in the m
forms of civilized discourse?

The explicit support in Freud himself for the positions which I wis
propose is very slim. This is partly because of the absence in Freud's wo
any sustained discussion of sublimation, and also because his own discus
of literature and the visual arts tend to stress either the compensatory or
symptomatic nature of art. Not only do the mechanisms of sublimation
quently seem indistinguishable from those of repression and sympto
formation; the work of art is often "treated"- interpreted and, one m
almost say, cured - as if it were little more than a socialized symptom. The
passages where Freud explicitly - and radically - differentiates sublima
from repression are therefore of particular interest. In a 1964 seminar, Lac
noted that in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud speaks of sublimatio
involving the satisfaction of a sexual drive "without repression." More rece
Laplanche has drawn our attention to Freud's remark, in his essay on Leona
da Vinci, that in sublimation a component instinct of sexual desire esc
from the sexual repression and is transformed from the very beginning int
tellectual curiosity. This libidinal energy, Freud suggests, is no longer attac
to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, which means that th
tellectual interests in whose service it now operates are not substitutive for
tions for those complexes. In this form of sublimation, sexuality would ther
provide the energy of thought without defining its terms. Or, to put this in another
we would have a nonreferential version of sexualized thought. What does this mean
Until now, the psychoanalytic criticism of art (including Freud's) has been
adept at recognizing sexually referential expression - that is, fundamen
symptomatic expression. We might now wish to devote our attention to those
moments or modes of cultural discourse (and I think that we have genera
referred to such moments or modes as signs of the "aesthetic") when t

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 U976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 36 OCTOBER

libidinal inve
become visibl
a mobility of
tent or inope
What is per
I find this to
which, for ex
limation as d
sublimated ac
Freud calls L
treat his pain
a repetition w
elsewhere in
how less desi
development
traumatic pr
what might b
perhaps best
quotes for a
argue (this ob
ideal of aesth
hibition of se
herent in tho
be renounced
Oedipal fathe
meta-discour
ical discourse about desire which would claim to be free of the dislocations in-
trinsic to its subject-this sublime-sublimated form of expression is particularly
vulnerable to a demystifying interpretation, to the sort of "symptom-analysis"
with which psychoanalytic criticism has most frequently been associated. This
discourse of transcendence is the discourse of repression. Indeed, it can be
shown that to the extent that the Freudian text itself aims at theoretical security
or finality, it becomes the object par excellence of those analytic techniques
which it confidently elaborates for use elsewhere- for what are presumed to be
less successfully de-sexualized forms of discourse and representation.
And yet, in the case of Leonardo, Freud is obviously tempted to locate the
interest of his painting in the very "problem" which presumably crippled his
work. In a previous discussion of the Leonardo essay, I have emphasized
Freud's hesitation between a paternally centered account of da Vinci's sexual,
artistic, and scientific life, and a maternally derived traumatic model of sex-
uality. The absence of a father in the artist's early years meant, according to
Freud, that no beneficently inhibiting Law put an end to the child's in-

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics 37

conclusive investigations of his

demned" to repeat those experim
so many attempts to repeat re
mother's love, to locate both he
pleasure. And yet the unarticu
points is that sublimation as no
"absence" of the father, or mor
father during the Oedipal perio
on the defeat or at least subo
configuration. Thus the play in
tween the indeterminate identities of mother and child, and of male and
female. Freud's ambivalent study of Leonardo is almost querulous in its at-
titude toward da Vinci's inability to complete a scientific investigation or an ar-
tistic project, at the same time that Freud can't help but suggest that a certain
kind of unsuccessful repetition, or of mistaken replication - the repeated at-
tempts to identify an erotically traumatizing and erotically traumatized human
subject-is in fact the source of Leonardo's aesthetic power, and that his artistic
achievement therefore depends on (rather than is inhibited by) a certainfailure
to represent.
In my recent study of Mallarm6, I have spoken of such a failure to repre-
sent in "LApres-midi d'unfaune."7 The faun's musical sublimations are extensions
of his sexual desires rather than repressive substitutes or symptoms of those
desires. His efforts to repeat a sexual encounter which may never have taken
place result, interestingly enough, in a productive dismissal of that encounter's
importance. More precisely, they result in the inclusion of a certain irony in
sublimated sexual energy - an inclusion which may be a crucial element in the
aestheticizing of the erotic. The faun moves from wondering if he desired a
mere dream to dreaming (in what he calls the long solo of his music) that
nature was charmed by his confusion between his dream and her (that is, be-
tween his sexual desire for the nymphs and the "real" scene in the forest). Thus
the faun ironically repeats his having been seduced or betrayed by his own
desires in the form of nature's being beguiled by his credulous song's confu-
sions. In a sense, that beguilement is the faun's ironic snapping back from his
own naivete - that is, from his realistic ambitions, from his wish to reproduce
exactly what "really" took place. It is the reservation hidden within the subse-
quent account of the faun's sexual assault on the nymphs, the potentially an-
nihilating awareness of that assault as mere illusion. And yet nothing is an-
nihilated. The faun's "remembered" erotic violence is somewhat modified by
our own uncertainty about where or who the faun is. He is the perpetrator of
violence, but he is also nature's having been charmed by the emptiness of that

7. Leo Bersani, The Death of Stiphane Mallarmi, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 38 OCTOBER

violence. The
It both remov
from underm
unlocatable an
The faun's m
the disguised
those impulse
what I have ju
represent a re
consciousness
In other terms
theory of sub
aesthetic wou
menaced acti
tured by a pe
psychoanalyti
ieties "behind
texts. It wou
tions and form
of art itself ex
sexual is, at t
(or psychicall
plicitly propo
replication. T
domesticatin
mutes biologi
Art interpre
we call critici
recognitions
therefore be
aggravated ir
gravated form
in a sense, to
of art represe
critical self-
itself: my di
should constan
itself. More p
those represe
should also ar
within those
sublimations, criticism is that moment of self-reflection which locates the
erasures of form in art; or, to put this even more radically, criticism makes

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics 39

manifest the ontology of huma

visibility in art.
From this perspective, the sp
ticular the speculative works of
tistic text of our time. I of course mean "critical" both in the self-reflexive sense I
have just proposed and in the sense of a crucial event in the history of textuality.
It is perhaps something akin to this latter sense that Laplanche has in mind
when he speaks of psychoanalysis as not only outlining a theory of cultural
sublimations, but also of being a new moment, a new movement, in the history
of the very forms of sublimation. In my recent work, I have been treating the
Freudian text as if it were a work of art. By this I do not mean that Freud is
"more interesting as a writer" than as a more or less scientific theoretician of
desire, or that he "belongs" to the history of literature. I do not consider
psychoanalysis as continuous with any literary tradition; nor would I argue
that art has any priority over psychoanalysis. We are no more justified in merely
applying the familiar techniques of literary analysis to the psychoanalytic text
than we are in mauling the literary text with the diagnostic tools of
psychoanalysis (and it makes little difference whether we diagnose, say, anality,
repressed homosexuality, or Oedipal conflicts on the one hand, or, in a more
sophisticated analysis, the formal characteristics of primary process thinking).
Rather, Freud's work is a special kind of aesthetic text: it seeks to stabilize the
perturbations of sexuality in a theory about the subversive, destabilizing effects of
human sexuality on the human impulse to form. Consequently, there is no
"moment" at which its formal replications of the sexual are not already a move-
ment which reflects (on) the collapse of formal relations, the precariousness of
representational discourse itself.
But there is considerable tension within the theoretical representations
themselves. On the one hand, we have what I take to be a repressive discourse,
or what could be called Freud's narrativizing speculations about human desire
and its antagonism to civilization. In this I would include the theory of a nor-
mative, teleological sexual development in the Three Essays, the reduction of
pleasure to a deathlike stasis and the taming of sexuality by Freud's as-
similating it to the integrative power of Eros in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the
topographical distinctions of The Ego and the Id, and the centering of the
Oedipus complex. I take these aspects of Freud's thought not as "false"
representations of desire, but rather as a faithful theoretical reflection of
precisely those repressive movements in human growth which seek to erase the
ontology of sexuality from the history of human desire. This movement cor-
responds to what I called earlier an art of post-Oedipal completeness. In more
general cultural terms, the repression of the masochistic, nonnarrative, time-
lessly replicative grounds of the sexual is also consonant with the melancholy
opposition between individual happiness and civilization in Civilization and Its
Discontents, an opposition which should be understood as a return of the re-

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 40 OCTOBER

pressed, as th
logical fable
tween the cl
other represe
define but w
of the footno
undermining
speculation o
kind of frag
human desire
into historical narratives about civilization and about the individual.
Finally, as these two examples suggest, the conflictual models which tex-
tually represent sexuality in Freud can also be read as conflictual interpretativ
models of the collapse of representation itself. That is, each model implicitly
offers a critical procedure relevant, I believe, to the ways in which we may ta
about art. On the one hand, Freudianism could be thought of as both justifyin
and promoting a tradition of derivative criticism - that is, criticism which ha
sought to explain art as an effect or precipitate of biographical or historic
pressures, or of generic constraints, or, in the case of a critical tradition ini-
tiated by Freud himself, of long-buried desires. From this perspective, th
psychological theories of Freud culminate a philosophical tradition which goes
back to Plato, a tradition in which the visible phenomenon is devalued as
mere shadow of a hidden or profound or essential truth. The most extreme ver-
sion of this tradition in psychoanalytic therapy is probably Melanie Klein's at-
titude toward children's games in analysis: the therapist interrupts the child's
diversionary play with an interpretation as soon as she sees the "truth" behind
the play. In all these cases, the collapse of representation is of course a pseudo-
collapse: a factitious discourse is merely replaced by a more authentic di
course, and any loss of textual intelligibility is more than compensated for by
the superior intelligibility of the hermeneutic appropriation of the text.
On the other hand, Freud also provides a very different sort of interpre-
tative model. It is less explicit than the more familiar one I have just outlined,
but this is perhaps because it manifests an attempt to speak what might be calle
the return to the unspeakable. Nothing is stranger (more unheimlich) than thos
moments when Freud's very attempt to explain the eruption of an unconsciou
violence into human life takes the form of an unintelligible textuality, of
failure to proceed, of a blocked, one might almost say anxious or anguished
argument. We have seen such moments in Freud's failure to conclude abou
the nature of pleasure in the Three Essays; we might also consider, from
similar point of view, his shifting definitions of the superego's aggressiveness i
Chapter 7 of Civilization and Its Discontents, and the astonishing textual move by
which he momentarily sacrifices the explanatory virtue of the Oedipus complex

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Sexuality and Aesthetics 41

itself in Chapter 3 of The Ego a

criticism, such passages can serve
sion of a general psychology by a
"central" text by a frequently un
This invasion is, however, not re
confrontation between the intelli
and I have tried to show in our st
the form of a subversion of narra
malism. And this formalism ma
perhaps we should speak of a pa
shattering which, even when it
nonetheless plunges the human
masochistic jouissance. The forma
thatjouissance. In so doing, they di
be the catastrophic symptom of o
our sexuality is grounded. The As
tions by substituting the "violence
tacts for the violence of narrativ
have been trained to think of as "s
to read the unreadable sexual by th
rative readability. If psychoana
blockages and representational f
which detects in the heightened vi
deferred) collapse of form, or the
Freud's own text exemplifies th
in the very process of its both c
replications. We should now be
cultural nonviability of the sexua
textual repression of the nature o
nonviability - the antagonism bet
a textual phenomenon. Rather, F
cesses of repression, symptomat
believe, also unleash sexuality in
the other hand, the taming of o
"assumption," or replay, of its m
tional relation between pleasure an
"corrected" only by our ironic ref
Only through this process of iron
of consciousness- is the violence o
product, or rather process, of cul
nothing more mysterious than the work of this replicative process. More exactly,

to the extent that cultural activities ignore the repressive message wh

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 OCTOBER

states most e
deed they ar
richly myste
Perhaps we
develop a the
extent that t
scenarios of
ductive con
developed a m
narrative of
culture is, in
having foun
grounds for
more - and n
to the alway

This content downloaded from

75.97.41.194 on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:42:51 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms