You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The face, it is inviolable; these eyes absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, offer, nevertheless, an absolute resistance to possession, an absolute resistance in which the temptation of murder is inscribed: the temptation of an absolute negation. The Other is the sole being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation of murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear: “Thou shalt not kill.”
There has been a malignant burst of overt homophobic sentiment and activity in the United States over the past decade. That burst accompanies an increasingly visible, insurgent, self-consciously articulated gay and lesbian presence.
Though clearly yoked to each other, each of these phenomena is also yoked to what felicitously calls the “epidemic of signification” surrounding the HIV virus and people living with AIDS.
Part of this epidemic of signification has consisted of a highly volatile, fiercely contested discourse centering on IV drug use and homosexualities. At issue is a cluster of “outlawed” highly eroticized acts and their sudden correlations with contagion and death.
Anxiety saturates that discourse. The convergence of erotics and fatal illness has transformed the always fantasized spectre of losses which unconsciously attends any penetration of the body—loss of the object, of the object's love, of castration anxiety, superego anxiety—into a realized nightmare.
One narrative of that nightmare is clear. Elemental fantasies