THIS article is bifocal. One, it looks at violence from the perspective and standpoint of ‘sexual violence’. In other words, it does not see sexual violence as one form of violence among the many forms of violence, as a subset of a larger set of violence. Rather it reverses the gaze and asks instead what violence would look like from the ground and vantage point of sexual violence. In this sense, the article asks whether sexual violence will help us rethink the question of, and our relationship with, violence.

This will, however, require a reflection on what is sexual violence? Is sexual violence a difficult and uncertain dialectic between ‘violent sex’ (‘marital rape’ being one expression of it) and ‘sexed violence’ (‘custodial rape’, or rape of women prisoners of war being one expression of it)?¹ In that sense sexual violence is already located in the ambivalent and incalculable maze of unconscious desire and the ‘motivated irrationality’ of aggression; the experience of such an ambivalent situatedness inaugurates in discussions on violence the question of desire.

The question of desire is in turn inaugurated in two ways: on the one hand, there is the possibility that the subject desires, desires too much; hence one is violent, one goes overboard. On the other, there is the possibility that the subject actually desires violence, that the subject finds pleasure in violence.

Building on the one hand, on the conceptual distinction between violent sex and sexed violence (as also the relationship between the two) and on the other between ‘desire gone overboard or awry’ and the ‘secret pleasures of violence’, one can revisit the question of marital rape. Marital rape can be seen as the perpetration of the ‘want’ of a man well beyond the ‘liking’ of the woman; hence the violence of crossing the limits of the consensual. It could also be seen as the ‘use of sex’, which in actuality is the abuse of power to inflict violence on the woman. In the earlier instance, man desires sex, but deploys violence as means. In the latter, man desires violence, but deploys sex as means.²

Two, can (sexual) violence be seen as a supplement, a kind of dangerous supplement to the ‘impossibility of the sexual relationship’? Does sexual violence emerge as the illusory mitigation – an undesirable mitigation nevertheless – of the impossibility of the sexual relationship? Is sexual violence premised on the grotesque delusion of forging – a forcible forging – of the sexual relationship, and the brutal bridging or the violent covering up of the lack of the sexual relationship? I shall explain what I mean by the impossibility of the sexual relation a little later. For the time being let us consider the infinity of our sexual selves, the private nature of our phantasies, and the uncanny character of the graph of unconscious desire – a graph of desire in which ‘woman’ is finding it difficult to insert herself – as creating conditions for an impossibility. It is, as if, the graph of desire lacks the feminine perspective; and such an absent feminine perspective creates conditions for what could be designated as a kind of haunting impossibility in the realm of the sexual.

Is sexual violence then a kind of an impossible forging of a relationship (a pathological forging nevertheless), a transgressive forging undoubtedly (through the repetition and reiteration of violence), violence standing in for the impossible transcendence of impossibility? This is all the more important because in discussions on the sexual, we are ‘dealing with the essence of the most intimate’, the most secret of pleasures and the attendant pain (the pain of intense pleasure and pain in pleasure),³ especially the opaque dimensions of unconscious sexual desire and its final yet contingent translation – a disastrous translation – into violence.

 

What compensates, however, for impossibility of the sexual relationship? Is it only and only violence, just violence that could compensate? Or, can there be other supplements? Could ‘love’ be a supplement? We shall take this up in the subsequent discussion on ‘in praise of love’. Is civilization, culture and society, another name, shorthand perhaps, for a search for the supplement? Gandhian non-violence is hence not the absence of violence, but a search for the radical Other of violence, for a supplement other than that of violence. Much of our civilizational, cultural or social fabric also depends on how the impossibility is experienced, understood and worked through.

 

If the impossibility is seen as eternal absolute inassimilability of the Other, or in other words, if the cause of impossibility is projected onto the Other, violence of the self on the Other could operate as the compulsive obsessive supplement.

If it is instead seen as the non-reaching of the self to the Other, or the non-relation of the self with the Other, in other words, as an impasse haunting the two – haunting both self and Other, or the two-ness of self and Other in turn haunting relationality, then one generates a reflective relation with impossibility. One moves perhaps from a rage-filled relationship with impossibility to a self-reflexive relation with impossibility. Does that change our relationship with violence? It looks like a self-reflexive relation with the impossibility that haunts the relation between the two, the two of the self and Other, the two of the sexes is the radical other of violence.⁴

The two of the sexes, the two of sexual difference brings us face to face with the impossibility of making One out of the two; violence is the force – coercive or subtle – of making One, making a forced One out of an impossible two-ness, a two-ness that cannot be reduced to a Oneness; and yet one yearns for Oneness and lapses somewhat tragically into violence. Love, on the other hand, is an acknowledgement of the two-ness and a self-reflexive working through such impossible and irreducible two-ness. The question of two-ness, the two of the sexes, the question of sexual difference thus becomes crucial in the rethinking of not just sexual violence, but violence. In other words, it is sexual violence (and the two of sexual difference) that offers us a clue into violence; as also a sense of the radical Other of violence.

 

It also helps us track, on the one hand, the uncomfortable question of unconscious desire at the core of violence; and on the other, the question of the perpetrator’s secret pleasures in the act of violence. The question of ‘perpetrator pleasure’ perhaps makes Foucault ask the question: ‘How does one keep from being fascist’ especially when one is ‘in love’ or is ‘loving the Other’, especially when one thinks one is ‘doing good’ (developmental praxis for example), or when one is engineering a revolutionary transformation of society.⁵ Foucault hence feels the need for ‘tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.’ This article argues for the need to track our secret pleasures in the every-day perpetuation of violence, from the subtle and the surreptitious, to the obvious ones.

 

If the context of sexual violence helps inaugurate the question of desire in violence, the question of desire in violence also raises the question of violence in desire. Further, the reflection on our secret pleasures in violence takes us to the other side of the question: subtle violence in pleasure. While in the earlier section I have discussed the ‘secret sexualization of violence’, this section shall discuss the ‘violative nature of sex, even if subtle’. It will ask not just how one can survive rape, but how one can survive the violence of the sexed intimate. How to survive not just violence, but survive pleasure without guilt, shame, self-blame and a sense of objectification?

The question of violence in pleasure takes us to the work of the now-out-of-fashion feminist thinker Andrea Dworkin, and to her life. Dworkin was a Jew. Her family was deeply affected by the Holocaust. The trauma of the Holocaust and sexual assault in the darkness of a movie theatre at the age of nine perhaps shaped Dworkin’s response to both violence and sex. In 1965, Dworkin was jailed for her role in the anti-Vietnam protests. While awaiting a hearing, she was sexually assaulted by two male prison doctors. She later married a Dutch political activist. Not long into her marriage, her new husband began beating her, a pattern of abuse that would last five years. She finally escaped and, fearing for her life, hid out in the city, becoming a sex worker to support herself. The experience of marriage and sex work showed Dworkin how ‘intercourse’, ostensibly an act of love, can also be brutal, emotionally sterile and self-serving, even masturbatory.

Dworkin thus saw a link between sex and violence, which later translated into a link between pornographic sex (which was also the ‘holy sacrament’ in the ‘church of sexual libertinism’) and subtle violence (understood as the objectification of women). The free flow of porn has become, according to Dworkin, a leading indicator that old moral values are dead and the ‘new ethic of sexual narcissism’ is alive and kicking (this of course does not mean that Dworkin does not question older values). Dworkin sees in the pornographic imagination a dehumanizing architexture of (male) desire; a fetishizing of the (female) body, its hyper-sexualization and consequent dehumanization: oh ‘this object’, this woman, this non-human thing wants it. ‘I want to be used …hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want’, she screams in the pornographic text. Her fair skin is the sexual fetish, is the place where the violation is acted out.

 

Society wants us to believe she is the standard, the standard of beauty, the standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is according to Dworkin a standard of compliance, a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it. There is also a sexualization of insult, of humiliation; of cruelty: ‘You are nothing but you are my nothing, which makes me someone’. The purpose of the sexual is as if to hurt; being hurt is ordinary. It happens every day, all the time, somewhere, to someone, in every neighbourhood, on every street, in intimacy, in crowds. Pornography thus plays a big part in normalizing the ways in which women are demeaned and attacked, in how the humiliating and insulting of women is made to look natural and inevitable.

Dworkin shows how pornographers use women’s bodies as their language. Women are their ciphers, their semantic symbols, the pieces they arrange on the chess board of desire in order to communicate among themselves and with their male clientele. Pornography also uses stigmatized men, for instance, African-American men, who were slaves, and who are now sexualized by contemporary pornographers as animalistic rapists. Dworkin sees pornography as a new institution of social control, a ‘democratic use of terror’ against all women, as also black men.

 

Earlier, I looked at the problems posed by the phenomenon of violence to our very existence itself. In what follows, I look at the problems posed by what is purportedly the experience of pleasure (and the violent fantasies that accompany sexual desire). Dworkin thus puts to question that which is expected to liberate: pornography and sexual libertinism; she shores up violence where there was (supposed to be only) pleasure.

It’s not that I agree with Dworkin. I have at most a kind of a backdoor agreement with Dworkin. My agreement is premised on the fact that pornography and sexual libertinism does appear to offer a cure (and Foucault questions this cure; I too; see below). The assumed disease is sexual repression. The cure is in sexual liberation; the lifting of repression through pornography in particular and sexual libertinism in general. How does one cure oneself of this cure itself is hence the question. Foucault begins History of Sexuality (volume one) with sharp sarcasm pertaining to how a certain story regarding an earlier,⁶ i.e. a 17th century frankness and a later, i.e. a 19th century Victorian repression of the sexual, has become paradigmatic of not just our understanding of the sexual, but our understanding of the politics of the sexual as well:

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. …At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; …But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. …On the subject of sex, silence became the rule. …This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. …What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; …This is perhaps what also explains the market value attributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would eliminate the effects of repression.

…To say that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive ‘interests’ that underlie this argument. The question I would like to pose… Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?⁷

 

Foucault raises three serious doubts concerning what he terms ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’ (and by default he raises serious doubts regarding the ‘liberation thesis’ through an overcoming of repression and an efflorescence of the sexual or the pornographic). In this article I shall discuss two of the doubts. First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? If not, then one needs to rethink the premise of sexual libertinism and the liberation thesis through an expansion of the pornographic imagination. Is the triple edict: (i) 17th century frankness, (ii) 19th century repression and (iii) 21st century liberation, the only way to write the ‘history of the sexual’? Or are other histories of the ‘sexual’ possible; not in an empirical, spatial sense; but in a conceptual, historiographical sense?

Second doubt: Do the workings of power really belong primarily to the category of repression? Or are other histories of power possible; histories other than that of repression; such that one can also think (or will have to think) the (ethico-)political in terms other than the dyad ‘repression/ oppression’-‘liberation/emancipation’? History of Sexuality offers us ground for a politics of the sexual different from the received notion of the politics of the sexual, politics revolving around the triad of ‘repression-confession/‘coming out’-liberation’.

The crucial question for Foucault, hence, is not just what constitutes our ‘sickness’/suffering today, but more profoundly what constitutes ‘cure’ as well. Which is why, what Foucault ‘attempts to cure us of is (not just sickness/suffering but) the cure itself’. The paradigm of ‘cure’ itself. The paradigm of the politics of sexual libertinism. In other words, Foucault is not just a philosopher of the political. He is a philosopher of the ‘politics of politics’; he is looking at the politics of the ‘political’, at the genealogy of the idea ‘political’.

While Dworkin problematizes the praxis of (sexual) pleasure and shores up a certain hyper-awareness to violence, even if surreptitious, in the very theatre of (sexual) pleasure or the space of the purportedly intimate, Foucault problematizes the thinking and the idea of the sexual around the paradigmatic binary repression= unpleasure/liberation=pleasure. This problematizes in effect the ‘sexual’.

 

If the earlier discussion had problematized violence through the sexual, this section has problematized the sexual through violence. It argues how the shadow of violence looks to be a constant accompaniment of the sexual, even an accompaniment of what one thought to be the space of sexual libertinism. Why? Why is there a constant shadow of violence on the sexual? Could there be other companions – companions other than violence? Does working through violence and violent cultures require a working through the sexual and through sexual cultures or cultures of the sexual?

This article thus argues that a mitigation of violence is intimately tied to a reform in the praxis of the sexual, and a working through the experience of sexual violence. Sexual violence as not just a form of violence, or one more form of violence – sexual violence as sexualization of violence and violative sex – offers us a way to re-conceptualize violence: violence as a dangerous supplement to the impossibility of the sexual relationship; hence the need for imagining other supplements and through such supplements reforming the praxis of the sexual. Is the cure then not in libertinism, but in finding/founding another companion, an Other companion of the sexual (other than the usual one: violence); a companion or a supplement the sexual requires because of what Lacan calls the impossibility of the sexual relationship?

 

What does Lacan mean by impossibility of the sexual relationship? I shall discuss in this section two possible meanings. One, where our stress is on the term ‘relationship’; where one can ask: Is relationship (that requires ‘two’ and a ‘two-ness’) haunted by the impossible negotiation of an incommensurate two, the incommensurate two of sexual difference, including the incommensurate unconscious phantasies of the two? Does Lacan in the process problematize the idea of relatedness such that he hints at the limits of relations? Does he mean to say that relation in a secure sense is an impossibility? The whole of the relationship is never ever achieved. Does the relation-lessness of the relation refer to this other Lacanian axiom according to which there is no wholeness.

Lacan thus undermines our naïve optimism in ‘easy legal union’ (say for example through the pronouncement that marks the institution of marriage: ‘hereafter you are man and wife’) as also in the ‘possibility of the sexual relation’, given that there are ‘two’ subjects – with the diffident architecture of their respective unconscious – and not just One.

Two, where our stress is on the term ‘sexual’; where one can ask: is the relationship sexuated? Is relationship or relationality impossible because the relationship is not sexuated; because the feminine perspective is absent in the relationship? Women are there. Women are there empirically. Femininity is there; femininity is there as complement of masculinity. But the feminine perspective – the perspective that differs with the masculine, which marks difference with the masculine, is absent.⁸ Perhaps it is such absence that makes a culture patriarchal. In a patriarchal culture men do not have a sexual relationship with woman per se but with their own phantasy objects. Do men then remain ‘masturbatory’ in the sexual relationship? Thus at an abstract level, there is no Other in the relationship; there is no relationship with the Other, with woman as Other.

What compensates for the impossibility of the sexual relationship? Violence? Marital rape? Date rape? Stalking? Driven by extreme self-love and the drive to possess the stalker can even kill women (‘go for the kill’, ‘I shall kill you with my love’, ‘you are killing me’: the sexual seems to be a killing field; metaphors of killing abound in the sexual field). The recent events in Delhi that have at last made it to mainstream ‘news’ stand testimony to violence compensating for the impossibility of a relationship. Elsewhere Lacan says ‘the sexual relates nothing’? The ‘sexual [as such] relates nothing’ is an interesting expression; what relates is more than the sexual; what relates is beyond the mere sexual. Can one then say that violence comes to supplement the lack of sexual rapport; and can it be something other than violence? Can it be ‘love’ as Badiou suggests?⁹

 

Badiou’s work In Praise of Love inaugurates the old question, once again, and yet again, encore: ‘What is love’ (including a reinventing of love in a contemporary world ‘rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance, and love is all too often seen only as a variant of desire and hedonism’). For Badiou, love is ‘to [learn to] see the world from the point of view of two rather than one’. Violence – in the forms marital rape, date rape, stalking – is to see the world from the point of view of the One – usually the masculine – rather than the two. Badiou argues: love begins in the wake of an unpredictable encounter that escapes the conventional representation of sexual roles, continues as a fidelity to the consequences of that encounter, and is sustained through an exposure to otherness,¹⁰ to difference and what Lacan famously describes as the impossibility of sexual relationship.¹¹

‘We are but one.’ Everyone knows, of course, that two have never become but one, but nevertheless, ‘we are but one’. The idea of love begins with that.¹²

 

Badiou¹³ thus foregrounds the unpredictable but essential encounter with the Other, the rendering two of the self-obsessed One in love. Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse (2002: 39) argues: a man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love. Barthes connects waiting to the inauguration of the feminine; he connects feminization to being-in-love. ‘Am I in love? Yes, since I’m waiting. …The lover’s identity is precisely: I am the one who waits, or learns to wait for the Other...¹⁴

 

Footnotes:

1. I am indebted to Ranjita Biswas for this rather insightful distinction between violent sex and sexed violence.

2. I am indebted to Manas Ray for deepening the relationship between the unconscious of desire and the unconscious of aggression.

3. Lacan first developed his concept of an opposition between jouissance and pleasure in his seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960). Lacan considered that ‘There is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle’. What however is jouissance? Where is the beyond? It is jouissance that compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his or her enjoyment, to go beyond pleasure. Yet the result of transgressing the limited space of pleasure, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this painful principle is what Lacan calls jouissance.

4. I am indebted to Prathama Banerjee for critical thinking on the question: ‘What is the Other of violence’.

5. See M. Foucault in Preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, xiiil.

6. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. (Vol. 1: An Introduction). Trans. Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, New York, 1978.

7. Ibid., pp. 3-10.

8. L. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1985.

9. See Alan Badiou in lacanian ink 21 – ‘The Scene of Two’.

10. Badiou and Lacan both wish to take us away from an obsession with the self to an Other; but Badiou to an Other without, and Lacan to an Other within.

11. P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Continuum, London, 2004, p. 3.

12. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore). Vol. Book XX, in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Trans. B. Fink. W.W. Norton, New York, 1998, p. 47.

13. A. Badiou, In Praise of Love. The New Press, New York, NY, 2012.

14. R. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. Vintage Classics, Random House, London, 2002.