Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

When we touch the anus, does it touch us back? While we may be hard pressed to consider the autonomy of the anus considering Lou Andreas-Salomé's essay insofar as it is the discovery and education of the anal process that establishes the self as self - ego and other, body and mind - let us consider it within the purview of the symbolic life of the anal drive. One does not have to go far to map its corollaries to the terms of the racial logic of prohibition: disgust, dissmell, disease, waste, mass, sickness, dirt, uncleanliness - notions routinely associated with otherness and marginality - demonstrate the ways that anal eroticism rears its face in the public imaginary of discrimination. Excrement as foreignness to selfhood, as objective, disconnected, and disavowed, is not dissimilar to the ways that racialized others are expunged and dislocated as such. Yet what must be underscored is the pleasure of prohibition as a necessity to racist self-mastery: ‘“Disgust”, standing watch over “dirt” (i.e. that which is in the wrong place, that which is excreted and must be eradicated), becomes the true mark of a life which - as human life - must distinguish life and death within itself yet again’ (p. 27). Thus, while at the level of the sexual the anal must be ‘rendered harmless as a drive’ (p. 24), its symbolic function invites room for serious inquiry. If the logic of racism is one of anal eroticism whereby a self is cast out as object by an other which the very self has yet to encounter (i.e. racial stereotyping), it is this encounter of the self as anal object that partakes of a psychotic aberration; it is the delivery of an excremental body that must be claimed yet disavowed and speaks to the ecstasy of the racialized body in terms of being outside of oneself.

To return to my initial query, then, let us consider the pleasure of anal eroticism from the other side: What is the space of pleasure when a self confronts itself as a racialized body - ‘impure’ an