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The erotic life of shame - animated in one's pleasure, guilt, or sadism - is neither antithetical to the pursuit of joy, nor does it prevent the compulsions of instinctual life. In Lou Andreas-Salomé's essay ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”,’ the fragmentations of the anal zone - waste and disgust - become hallmarks of death and reflect an implicit theorization of the white universal subject's dependency on a racialized other. Salomé's evasion of this dependency, through disavowing affects of disgust and pleasure, both cathected and constructed upon a disavowed Blackness, proves no more affixed to the reproduction of their renunciation than in the repudiation of their disavowal. As such, Salomé's discussion of disimbricating the anal drive from metaphors associated with an explicit Blackness presents a moment worthy of sustained attention.
‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ inscribes the psychoanalytic subject's experience of loss through its evisceration of Blackness as indexical to subject formation. The transgressive and filthy properties associated with shame of the pre-genital, and hence also the primitive, ossify in metonymic associations with Blackness. Failing to pursue the ramifications of her admission that anality must ‘be rendered harmless as a drive’ ‘despite its representational association with blackness [Schwärze]’ - a representation which, she avers, brings