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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality Foucault reflects on themes of anxiety situated in the Christian doctrine of the flesh that led to a pastoral ministry establishing the rules of a general social economy--rules that enabled, over time, a discourse on the flesh that took thrift, prudence, modesty, and suspicion as essential ethical premises in the emerging "art of the self." Rather than sensing flesh as a charged, motile potentiality of attachment and intimacy, it came to be seen as skin--as the limit of a sovereign body, embedding guilt and shame into the texture of its expression. This essay pursues the psychological and communication problematic of intimacy as a critical and developmental experience of the flesh. Foucault's concept of self-care and parrhesia, Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh and embodiment, and Bataille's concept of glory and eroticism contribute to a phenomenology of human development that seeks to articulate an idea of a self differentiated from the unspoken binds of familial anxiety and emotionality.
Keywords
phenomenology, sexuality, embodiment, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille
Glorious Experience and Risk
It has been thirteen years since I smoked my last cigarette. Long before I quit I fully understood the extent to which I was putting my health and the quality of my life in serious jeopardy. I was more than sufficiently informed of these risks even before I started smoking at age 17. I also have no doubt that the risk, the stroll into darkness, the dangling of oneself over the abyss, was all part of the attraction. The association of smoking with black and white danger as well as with black and white glamour and noir sophistication became my semiotic hook into a world of people whose perspectives on life were, in my mind, wider and more intrepid than the prudent yet neurotic stance of the normal and everyday. I felt as though I shared with other smokers the treasured secret that we did not need to be safe all of the time.
My simple faith in the existence of that secret led me to a feeling of mysterious confidence with other smokers. As I imagined it, we were all willing to die, at least a little bit, in order to live more completely. To say that I am "romanticizing" the reality of a known carcinogen and, in so many other ways, a pathetic and unfortunate addiction in itself is, I think, to miss the point. Even now, the discursive and embodied gesture of smoking reveals, perhaps, the essence of what it means for an anxious subject to overcode the meaning of her or his worried, despairing, apprehensive, often frenzied existence. It likely does not cross the threshold of romance, but it may lie at the heart of romanticization. It is impossible to countenance a day, even long, long before the conclusions of the 1964 Surgeon General's Report, during which sensible people looked at the habit of cigarette consumption and remarked to themselves: "that surely seems like a smart and healthy choice for a person to make." It seems as silly as imagining the likelihood of a consensus affirming that eating excessive amounts of candy to be good for a child's development.
The embrace of any taboo entails the psychology of an anxious subjectivity in search of selfhood. It is no different than tattooing or ritual scarring: what one undertakes does not advance the cause of one's organic embodiment, at least taken from a physiological or medical perspective. Ostensibly, it does a body no good at all, deadening, perhaps toxifying one's skin or sensitive, perhaps delicate tissue with fire or chemicals. It may well be said that the inner experience of decadence is a sacrifice of the body for the flesh--a sacrifice of longevity and organic strength for what Merleau-Ponty terms chiasm, or flesh. Here, decadence enlivens the flesh. It enables a modality of communication and, hence, of social embodiment, that lights psychological vistas for the possibilities of agency and experience.
As such, smoking cigarettes even years after I had experienced a few episodes of coughing and shortness of breath placed me at tremendous risk for numerous respiratory and circulatory ailments but, at the very least, it put me in league with other smokers. Now, of this one broad social category, I did not seek communion with the whole. Cigarette smoking, like eating, is a mannered activity. We all eat, but the social event of eating does not make us all the same. Consuming food together, we observe, in the manners of the table, the style of selfhood that each of us brings to the occasion. How quickly do we finish what is cooked? Are we masticating each mouthful with a pattern that enables the appreciation of subtle flavors, and are our palates even sufficiently cultivated to recognize such differences? Are we embracing or avoiding contact with unfamiliar, perhaps daunting, specimens, shapes, flavors, and culinary combinations?
Smoking is, of course, similarly mannered--and, during the time in which I smoked, my reading of its codes was a function of my perception of the historical context in which smoking seemed to possess a semiotic passage to a world of cosmopolitan decadence. This passage is not a function of a single sign (i.e., the cigarette) but of an interstitial symbolic amalgam that enables the motility of imagination into the plasma of reverie. For me at age 36, one full year before I successfully quit, each cigarette, now that I look back on it, was a hopeful embodiment of the social milieu and dramatic gesture of a European salon or a New York City cafe. Georges Bataille (2001, p. 5) provides on-point commentary to the subject under discussion: "In one way or another, something is always missing from the communion sought by humans, driven by the feeling that solitude is impotence itself. We must risk our lives: this implies entering into a movement connecting ourselves to other humans who are similar to ourselves. This is absolutely necessary for the life of the flesh." Bataille frames this particular insight on human communion in terms of what he identifies as a "concern for glory." "In my view," he writes (2001, p. 6), "the concern for glory is conveyed in the form of energy spent toward no other end than the pursuit of glory."
Glory and Intimacy, Speaking and Freedom
Glory, as I interpret it, is an intrapersonal and, to some extent, narcissistic event of ecstasy. Yet my argument is that it is anything but a pathology. It is my interpretation that it dwells in the most earthly sense of Nietzsche's "will to power." The concern for glory is fully consonant with what Foucault means by "care of the self." It is the recognition that there is pleasure in living, and that such pleasure is derived in terms of the reverie of the becoming-self. The symbolism of the becoming-self dwells within the embodied memory of the subject just as much as it presents itself as an inarticulate vision of that which awaits our arrival at the vanishing point of the horizon. We can find an earthly glory in a dish of ice cream consumed during a stolen moment of a hectic day just as much as we can experience another kind of glory, not earthly but worldly--a triumph in this case--in the accomplishment of a difficult task during that same day. There is a bit of worldly glory, again a triumph, in finding a twenty-dollar bill on the pavement of an empty street just as we can experience a more earthly glory in purchasing an article of clothing that makes us feel more attractive, perhaps sexy--and there is once more a worldly victory in discovering the item to be on sale.
Bataille (2001, p. 6) defines the concept of glory, this earthly glory, almost in so many words, as "the negation of the avaricious isolation of the individual."
Bataille (2001, p. 6) seeks to demonstrate "that the search for glory ... is the means by which communication occurs between [human beings]." He then offers an illustration with particular regard to smoking: "It seems certain to me that tobacco, even smoked in solitude, is a connection between [persons]" (Bataille, 2001, p. 6). In a similar sense, when we talk to ourselves, we depend upon the same language we use when we talk with others. Our selfhood is never achieved alone. Bataille (2001, p. 6) then maintains that the "consumption of tobacco [i]s a purely glorious expenditure, having for its goal to procure for the smoker an atmosphere detached from the general mechanics of things." He continues:
When smoking, the human mind not only surrenders itself to a squandering that is indefensible according to sound reason: it is, above all, a squandering deprived of meaning, deprived of any knowledge of itself; such deprivations allow absence to reappear.... Insofar...
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