Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ begins with a scene of instruction, the dramatization of ‘our anal education.’ In this classroom, everyone comes to the table knowing how to shit themselves, but one must be taught not to play with it or to enjoy it too much. Above all, we are taught: ‘Don't put that in your mouth!’ And this first ‘don't,’ which is articulated through parental disgust (‘Pfui!,’ p. 19), teaches us not only to revile our own shit, but also how to revile in the first place, itself a major achievement in the arduous process of becoming a subject. Here Andreas-Salomé borrows from Freud's early formulation of disgust as a ‘watchman,’ an affect employed to regulate our pleasures and to police and maintain the boundaries of the self. In this lesson, it is worth noting, we take possession of a quasi-instinctual affect (disgust) in response to the social imperative to renounce an instinctive pleasure (shitting), setting in place an unstable duality that pits some sensory-affective forms of response against others in the unfolding of the civilizing process.

If this scenario rather quickly begins to sound too stringent - why even bother becoming a self? must we take off our diapers and internalize our parents' disgust? - some of the reviled anal pleasure is fortuitously reintroduced, now in the form of not-shitting, which turns out to be almost as pleasurable as shitting itself. Indeed, what not-shitting lacks in the unrestrained gush of warmth and relief, it makes up for with the quieter pleasure of internal pressure and the civilizational bonuses of regulating the self's porosity and of learning to enjoy outwitting our parents by withholding our shit - which, in a typical performance of exasperated mixed messaging, they now plead and bargain with us to let loose, while we savor the control on both ends.

At this point, with the achievement of ‘this most primitive exercise of ego upon drive’ (p. 20), we are ready to graduate from ou