Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’: Lou Andreas-Salomé's essay poses its problem frontally. How can what lurks behind the front, behind the ‘mature’ genitality expressed in cathexes of sexual objects, be kept - conceptually, temporally, spatially - in back, behind the ‘sexual,’ so as not to pollute ‘the sexual factor’ with the evils linked to anality: deathliness, hatred, narcissism, and evacuated meaning - everything attributable, in Salomé's phrase, to ‘the realm of absolute negation’ (p. 26)? How can one shelter the ‘sexual’ from the ‘revulsion’ triggered by the ‘anal’ while still insisting, with the very formulation of ‘anal sexuality,’ on the entanglement of the two? Though Andreas-Salomé herself identifies resistance to ‘anal sexuality’ as a signal of ‘outrage’ at the thought of sexuality being ‘sullied through reference to the anal,’ her essay betrays her own profound ambivalence about their relation - an ambivalence all the more pointed for her association of ambivalence itself with anality.

Reflecting on the ‘first prohibition’ that stains the anus and its products with disgust (the prohibition that conjures the ego by severing the child at once from the world outside and from the ‘anal drive’ within), Andreas-Salomé, well in advance of Foucault, sees this ‘first true “repression”’ as productive of the anal pleasure it condemns. In the process of learning to control its bowels, and thus to ‘master’ the drive, the infant discovers the pleasurable tension involved in ‘retaining its stool.’ This pleasure, coinciding with the sense of disgust the anal domain now inspires, gives rise, as Andreas-Salomé sees it, to an originary ambivalence: ‘As we learn to stand up to ourselves through prohibition, and as we come back to a more emphatic sense of ourselves through anal pleasure, an ambivalence arises in our relation to the environment. Prohibition and punishment rupture the complete, reciprocal unity of world and individual’ (p. 21). This amb