Repressive desublimation and the great refusal in Bret Easton Ellis's fiction

In 1968, Herbert Marcuse believed that a Great Refusal was possible, one that would deny the exploitative power of corporate capitalism. Marcuse's vision was never realised. This essay argues that society today is in an advanced state of that which the Frankfurt School termed repressive desublimation and questions whether a liberationary praxis is still possible. It claims that Bret Easton Ellis's fiction choreographs an internalising of the forms of critique that marked 1968 and about which Marcuse writes. It is Ellis's act of double voicing that allows him to develop a duplicitous recalcitrant voice within the state of assimilation and it is double voicing which emerges as the key technique in Ellis's work that effects an ongoing critique in commodity society. Looking at Slavoj iek's recent revisionism of the notion of repressive desublimation, which connects Marxism and psychoanalysis, the essay considers how Ellis's novels, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, function to address and reconfigure the relationship between the status of the Marxist fetishised object and the psychoanalytic phobic object in the present-day era of late capitalism. This essay seeks to illuminate how Ellis's fiction, through an involution of Marcuse's political theories, enacts a contemporary refusal from within the state of reification.

Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Engaged Disengagement: Reframing as Feminist Critique in Vanessa Place’s Tragodía

This essay positions Vanessa Place’s Tragodía (2011) as an instance of reframing as contemporary feminist cultural critique. An enquiry into allegory, hermeneutics, and the performative use of indifference in Place’s conceptual writing generates insights into new narrative conditions produced by Place’s work. Tragodía does not represent trauma but rather generates trauma through a poetic practice that has a bipartite structure: conceptual writing (allegory) and Place’s performances of the narratives. Place’s performance is read in this analysis as an ancillary act of reframing that raises the question of what might be at stake in the performative use of indifference. Understood as a strategy of failure, Place’s performance parallels the lack of mediation in the conceptual act of reframing. Positioned counter to the linguistic deformation of the subjects' speech acts and the erasure of affect that occurs in the legal narratives through the act of interpretation, the refusal to interpret implicit in the act of reframing in Tragodía is an ethical gesture, a paratextual pathway to metamorphosis. In its refusal to interpret, Tragodía creates a site of contextual resistance to the oppression of the subjects’ organic narratives by the institutional language of the law, and offers a new textual field of meaning-making.