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| Chapter 6.
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Chapter 6. Disgusted Decency: the Case for De-Meaning Sex.
“It is the worst case I have ever tried. That you, Taylor, kept a kind of male brothel, it is impossible to doubt. And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt. I shall, under the circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence the law allows. In my judgement, it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the court is that each of you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.”
Mr Justice Wills, passing sentence at the trial of Oscar Wilde, May 1895 (1)
“People in the course of the civilising process seek to suppress in themselves every characteristic they feel to be animal.”
Norbert Elias (2)
“Disgust always bears the imprint of desire”
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (3)
Disgusting Desires: ‘Tremendously attractive’ boys and adult gazes
During a stay in Venice in 1911, the author Thomas Mann was to have an experience which eventually sponsored his magnificent story Death in Venice. He became enchanted with a boy – one of the children of an aristocratic Polish family staying at the same hotel. Whilst he never touched the boy physically, he became beguiled and entranced by the youngster’s beauty. ‘Tadzio’ - the ‘beautiful boy’ who draws the ailing, middle-aged character von Aschenbach out of his ascetic seclusion into desire and dissolution was born. Mann’s widow, Katia, commented on the episode:
“All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from actual experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband’s attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice – that he didn’t do – but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … “(4)
In the book, Tadzio is fourteen (although Katia Mann describes him as about thirteen) and in Luchino Visconti’s visually ravishing film, the character is played by the fifteen year old Swedish actor, Bjorn Andresen. The real life ‘Tadzio’ who generated such magnificent artistic perceptiveness in Mann’s writing was later identified as Wladyslav, subsequently Baron, Moes (during the holiday in Vienna, he was called by his family and friends “Wladzio” or “Adzio”). At the time of Mann’s infatuation, he was eleven years old (5).
Mann’s homosexuality was strictly forbidden in the world he had to live in; he could only explore it, express it, struggle with it, in his work. He spent his life gazing at beautiful boys, translating the images and desires he experienced into evocative, haunting and luminous prose , but never once laying so much as a finger on any of them. For Mann, as for Germaine Greer (6) in our own time, boys in early adolescence had a spectacular yet ineffable erotic beauty, a beauty which would eventually fade but was all the more moving and enchanting for that very evanescence. Was he a pervert?
Today’s sex police would, of course, have no doubt about the answer to this question. Should they have become aware of his erotic interests (7) they would have destroyed him pitilessly long before he had a chance to write his fabulous novella, or anything else for that matter. ‘Morality’ would have been enforced, but the world would have been wholly deprived of his literary brilliance. Even so, the sex police would have performed such imbecilic destruction in great sincerity. As we saw in the previous chapter, sincere disgust, the basis of malignant decency, can be brutish, ruthless and lethal, especially when it involves lying in the guise of truth.
Since the sex police and their battery of allied professions, social workers, probation officers, and the sprawling edifice of child ‘protection’ advocacy charities they are inextricably bound up with, perpetuate their crusade and advance their careers with the weapon of disgust bequeathed them by our law courts, it may be an apt moment to return to this much used but little analysed emotion. What is disgust and sexual disgust in particular? And what is it about sex and ‘children’ (anyone under the age of eighteen in current UK law) that so effortlessly foments its most hyperbolised and murderous expression?
For all the non-violent, intelligent individuals who have been interrogated, humiliated, degraded and destroyed by ignorant policemen, strutting like black-booted thugs through your homes, your minds, your souls, spouting nescient certainties and socially endorsed bigotry, this chapter is for you, or for those who have been left after your entirely ethical decision to end your life.
Dissecting Disgust
(i) Cultural boundaries: Repression, exclusion and ecstatically beautiful experiences
Jonathan Dollimore, one of the most formidably brilliant thinkers on human sexuality writing today, made this astute observation in the course of an essay exploring the complex and paradoxical interrelationship between desire and sexual disgust:
“Disgust is typically experienced at the boundaries of a culture, and of the individual identities of those who belong to it, and its focus is typically what is excluded by those boundaries and especially what is just the other side of them. Social cohesion requires that the securing of the boundaries of the larger culture, and the individual identities within it, should coincide, whereas in practise of course they often do not. To be sure, they do coincide, more or less, and this contributes greatly to social cohesion. From one angle it is the coincidence which seems conclusive; from another, the mismatch; from yet another it is the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between those differently positioned in relation to those boundaries: what to one person is the most ecstatically beautiful experience in the world, to another might be so repulsive it deserves reprobation, punishment, mutilation and death, and never more so than where sexuality is concerned.”
(8)
There are some dazzlingly apposite insights in this little paragraph: the fact that disgust can be aroused in a most virulent way by desires which lie just the other side of a dominant cultural boundary alerts us to the curious fact that it is the varieties of longing most proximate to the ‘in-group’, rather than the most remote, which inflame the most violent suppression. And that an appreciation of ‘ecstatic beauty’ which is not endorsed (consciously) by the centre can be redescribed by the powerful as an evil worthy of extermination.
Applauding the courage and tenacity of early gay liberationists like the author Andre Gide, who did much both in his fiction and most notably in his book Corydon to rebut the murderous disgust directed at people like him in his day, Dollimore nonetheless sounds a cautionary note. The liberation Gide played no small part in effecting may yet have contributed to the manufacture of new, replacement objects of disgust which are despised with even stronger revulsion than their predecessors. Dollimore notes than, in certain important public contexts at least, it is no longer possible to be freely racist, misogynistic or homophobic. But restricting the range of socially sanctioned disgust objects does not diminish disgust - it merely intensifies its expression onto a smaller repertoire of substitutes, rendering the revulsion considerably more malignant in the process. And it does not escape Dollimore’s attention that, presently, our favourite scapegoated term – the object we most love to hate – is ‘paedophilia.’
Whilst Dollimore only briefly alludes to it in this essay, he is nonetheless insisting that a specific structure of domination can, under the guise of liberalisation and modernisation, covertly maintain its essential hierarchy of power by directing and concentrating its violence onto a replacement ‘out-group’: “... it is cultural and other kinds of imperialism which have led to repression and exclusion through the universalising of the culturally specific by those with the power to do so” (9). As with the tragic and murderous witch-hunts of an earlier era, in the days when most people believed that the devil was stalking the earth in order to seduce eccentric old widows into becoming his disciples, lethal social-scapegoating movements have only ever taken off when the educated elite have endorsed them. That said, terror and desire may be more implicated in one another than the decent amongst us would like to acknowledge. And like desire, disgust can migrate and mutate; it slides with serpentine ease from one object to another, and gets ever more concentrated in those places and persons designated as socially expendable scapegoats: those who stand a gnat’s whisker to the wrong side of the cultural line separating the decent from the indecent.
It is not, however, axiomatic why certain forms of desire are regarded with disgust, and Dollimore’s point that people are differently positioned in relation to hegemonic boundaries is a highly salient one. Taking seriously the remark by Stallybrass and White in the third opening epigram for this chapter, he nonetheless urges against a simplistic approach. Whilst influenced by Freud’s theory of intrapsychic repression, for example, Stallybrass and White’s analysis of identity formation in dominant groups, notably the bourgeoisie, keeps the psychoanalytic concept of repression distinct from materialist and anthropological accounts of exclusion.
The newly emerging bourgeois subject defined himself by the repression and exclusion of the ‘low’ other, with ‘lowness’ being figured in sexual, racial and social class terms. But as Dollimore notes, what was excluded socially became psychically central: bourgeois fantasy life came to be constituted by the return of what it excluded or repressed. In both psychic and social life, the radically different processes of repression and exclusion are often inseparable, even though there is no direct and linear correspondence between the individual mind and society.
Even so, perhaps this fact may lead us to concur with literary theorist Jacqueline Rose when she insists that the sociopolitical domain cannot “continue to be analysed as if it were free of psychic and sexual processes, as if it operated outside the range of its effects” (10). The relationship between psyche and society may be mediated, but it is also intimate.
It might be interesting to see where we end up if we were to take Rose’s suggestion seriously. We might think of Freud’s concept of repression as a form of reversible deceit (“I’m just not interested in that sort of thing, even though I can’t stop fantasising about it secretly”) and cultural exclusion as a much more violent spitting out (“No decent person should ever even imagine such a scenario and, if they do, they should be eliminated!”). I think that, even with Dollimore’s cautions against psychologistic reduction in place, psychoanalysis might yet come to our aid. The work of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan may, as I hope to argue, be too valuable to ignore.
(ii) Emotion and the Rule of Law
It has been a principal argument of this work that we become exceedingly dangerous and cruel when we attribute to others whatever we do not wish to acknowledge in ourselves. Our wish for self-purity involves fantasies of splitting (I can surgically cut away what I refuse to accept in myself), disavowal (I never had that desire/impulse in the first place –‘it’ does not belong to me) and projection (‘it’ is ‘really’ out there, in the bad people – ‘them’ – who therefore threaten my/’our’ goodness and so must be eradicated). These processes always work together, functioning as a kind of triad of deceit: they can be thought of as key components of perhaps the most malignant form of lying our species has devised, because they ultimately involve not only the pursuit of the impossible (namely, the attempt to escape the mysteries, horrors and mortality of our animal bodies) but the malice-driven destruction of other human beings. Whilst they undoubtedly function at the level of the individual mind, they also readily lend themselves to sociopolitical deployment. And when disgust is the motive force behind them, the resulting ideologies of ‘us’ and ‘them’ will be deeply inflected with a virulent malevolence, ensuring that violence, unfettered cruelty and even murder are never very far away.
Disgust-based splitting, disavowal and projection will be used, as it always has been, to justify evil in the name of purity, subjugation and persecution in the name of righteousness. If it is has served an evolutionary purpose in our prehistory, acting as a kind of primitive warning about the danger of noxious and putrid materials, it is nonetheless a crude and often profoundly inaccurate guide to ethical living, especially as political scapegoats and dissidents - human beings - can be so easily redesignated as (social) ‘*bleep*’ under its sway. Disgust lies behind racial segregation, misogyny, homophobia and extermination camps. And, as Dollimore noted, it is always especially virulent when it is used to police sexuality. To the list we have just outlined, we must of course add our latest social pathology: our most fraught contemporary preoccupation - a kind of malignant, liberty-destroying hobby, as pernicious and misanthropic as it is deeply and covertly enjoyed – paedohysteria.
When our beliefs and actions arise from such aggressive projective processes, our acts may be regarded as ‘moral’ insofar as they conform with social norms, but may nonetheless be deeply unethical, in that they involve fundamental lies. For the purposes of our argument here, this is the principal distinction between what I have been calling morality (or moralism) and ethics: the former is a toeing of the dominant ideological line, irrespective of how much harm and misery it inflicts, but the latter requires a commitment to truth (or at least truthfulness), even - perhaps especially - when this is at odds with social convention.
If we believe that the rule of law should be temperate, reasonable and proportionate in secular liberal democracies, we do not have to insist that emotion should play no part in justice. This is an argument which quickly capsizes when you try to put any weight on it: emotionless law would require us to regard a woman who, in self defence, kills the partner who has violently terrorised her over years as equivalent to a gangster who shoots a passer by who accidentally stepped on his shoe, simply because both have killed someone. Anger and indignation, much as we tend to think of them as ‘negative’ emotions, can also constitute important elements of solidarity: we can identify deeply with someone who has been terribly wronged and harmed by another. It is hard to imagine a form of justice which is autistic about human emotionality: a system of law wholly indifferent to human suffering would be both grotesquely mechanical and insanely unjust.
Whilst contemporary cognitive psychology is slowly catching up with him, it was Freud who first showed that emotions are not simply neurotransmitters in the brain, biochemical substances in the blood or irrational bursts of passion – they involve complex cognitive evaluations, even if these do occur at a phenomenally fast rate. When we decide that a mother who snaps and kills the person who has murdered her abducted child has far more in her favour to mitigate her sentence than, say, a misogynistic rapist who simply enjoys torturing women, we are using emotions, which include reasoning and empathic identifications.
We may not be able to do without emotion in a system of justice but we would do well to be very careful about the kind of emotion we allow to inform law. Anger and indignation, as well as compassion and empathy, may, at times, be indispensable. But there are some emotions which we should never allow to contribute to law-making, because they are by definition excessive, unreasonable and disproportionate. I am thinking of disgust and shame. That these are the very emotions which have crafted ‘child pornography’ law in the Western world, powerfully governing enforcement, prosecution and sentencing, should give any reasonable person serious pause for thought.
Anger, indignation, empathy: none of these are fool-proof, as we can be mistaken in our evaluations, yet they are probably indispensible constituents of commensal human fellowship, imperfect though they may be. Anger can be an entirely reasonable emotion when we identify with the suffering inflicted on another human being, or any other animal, for that matter, as a result of someone’s cruelty, greed, or indifference (although I think indifference is itself a form of cruelty). From a psychoanalytic point of view, in a situation such as this, we are using ‘introjective identification’, taking into ourselves the suffering of the wronged person and imagining how we would feel if we were subjected to a similar wrong. Anger can in this way be the basis of empathy and compassion. But when we resort to revulsion and shame, we inevitably corrode and poison fellow-feeling.
If compassion involves absorption, doing our best to take in what someone else is experiencing so that we might discover or create it in ourselves, even if doing so causes us distress, disgust involves expulsion. And any form of decency which uses expulsive disgust to police its imaginary purity is perhaps by definition an authoritarian-fundamentalist project: murder is never very far away. It may be worth our while spending a little more time elaborating on this distinction, as I think it enables us to discriminate between humane varieties of emotion on the one hand and pernicious, misanthropic enmity on the other, a distinction of pivotal importance when it comes to formal, public justice. It helps us to find grounds, in other words, to say yes to some forms of emotion and no to all forms of vituperation when we are considering the rule of law (as opposed, say, to the rule of policemen, NGOs, or judges, some, possibly many, of whom rather like the circulation of pernicious disgust, as it violently preserves the prevailing moral order).
(iii) Truth, Lies and the Making of Paranoid States
We have seen that identification plays an important, if not pivotal role, in empathy, even angry empathy. Identification, though, is also deeply implicated in disgust and humiliation (the act of shaming another person), but it is of a radically different nature to the kind we use when we are angry at the harm inflicted on another - almost the exact reverse, in fact. First described in 1946 by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (11), it is ‘projective identification’, imagining that we can get rid of despised aspects of ourselves by depositing them permanently in someone else, which governs the experience of disgust and shame.
What is potentially malignant about projective identification is not only that it militates against learning wisely (and truthfully) from experience, it actively manufactures fraudulent and even delusional realities. Unlike the act of projection Freud described, which is often only transient and amenable to correction through insight and truthful interpretation, projective identification tends to be intransigently refractory to change. It typically has the effect of violently obliterating all characteristics in the targeted person or group which contradict the projected attribute. As we saw in the last chapter with Slavoj Zizek’s example of the Jew in anti-Semitic fantasy (or ‘the black’ in racist fantasy of a more recent vintage), the person or group on the receiving end of projective identification gets treated as though they were nothing but the projection. All evidence to the contrary is forcefully ignored.
Introjective identification generally enriches the mind, expanding our repertoire of thought and experience even, or perhaps especially, when it is uncomfortable or painful to do so, whilst projective identification depletes it and induces paranoia, since what is projected is experienced as ‘bad’. Klein believed that projective identification was far more primitive than the introjective form, and was the desperate defensive manoeuvre of the fragile, inchoate, infantile ego. Whilst all ordinary people are prone to both projective and introjective mechanisms of identification, in a healthy state of mind, the capacity for introjective identification predominates.
Klein’s brilliant article made a further point: she described two radically different mental positions, which are not necessarily (or not only) developmental stages, since we can find ourselves moving back and forth between them throughout life. The more primitive is what she perceptively called the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’. Here, massive splitting and extreme projective identification predominate: in a paranoid-schizoid state of mind, I may find you blissfully perfect right up until you say or do something which perturbs me or discomforts me in some way. Immediately, I will use this ‘evidence’ to convince myself that I now know the real truth about you: you are completely bad, you were only pretending to be nice before I unearthed the truth and you are obviously trying to harm me or poison me. In paranoid states of mind, we are always vigilant for any sign of malice in the environment largely because our unconscious act of projective expulsion has planted it there in the first place.
When I am clinically paranoid – as opposed to truly socially persecuted - I am conscious of pervasive hostility and danger, but I have radically obscured its source: myself. I allow myself to be aware of the hostility, but not of my act of projection. In the blink of an eye, I have split my experience into two radically discontinuous parts – those that are all good and those that are all bad: the paranoid-schizoid state cannot hold together incompatible or conflicting attributes. As people are vastly complicated combinations of so called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ attributes, this is not an especially sound basis for building any form of compassionate fellow feeling, chiefly because once you get revealed as all bad, you must be eradicated. The moment of turning bad, crucially, has in reality nothing to do with anything truly significant about you: it’s just that your inadvertent action, comment, or slip of the tongue has massively mobilised my own unacknowledged and repudiated violence, which, through projection, I now experience as in you, not me.
Klein’s work with profoundly disturbed patients led her to believe that, in psychotic and severe schizoid conditions, the paranoid-schizoid position was firmly ascendant. In more healthy development, the paranoid-schizoid position is supplanted by the more integrative and truthful ‘depressive position.’ This is perhaps an unfortunate choice of terminology as it suggests unhappiness and illness, whereas it is clear that Klein sees it as vitally necessary to psychic health. A British contemporary of Klein’s, Donald Winnicott, who we came across in Chapter 3, preferred to call this momentous development ‘the stage of concern.’ Whatever we call it, the crucial distinction is that, in this new mental state, the mind becomes strong enough to bear the truth – namely, that I and other people are made up of qualities which are inextricably both gratifying and frustrating. I cannot really carve experience up into neatly separate bundles marked ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’. I begin to feel remorse and sadness at having raged at someone who I now know to be a source of love and comfort, too; I want to make reparation for any harm or hurt I may have caused (hence Klein’s use of the term ‘depressive’, meaning the sadness and regret I feel at having wronged another person).
(iv) Law from a paranoid-schizoid perspective: from reparation and reintegration to revenge and humiliation
None of this is to suggest that we should never experience disgust; if it has been used to justify torture and extermination, it has also played a part in civilization’s most exalted achievements. There would be no antibiotics, no analgesics, no sterile surgical operations if we had not developed a capacity to fear and distance ourselves from foul-smelling, putrid matter; all cultures dispose of their dung, after all. But perhaps it is the fantasy of proximity to *bleep* and waste, with its concomitant fear of contamination, which lies at the root of disgust. Here is Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, in her elegantly argued refutation of the role of disgust in law:
“Because disgust embodies a shrinking from contamination that is associated with the human desire to be nonanimal, it is frequently hooked up with various forms of shady social practise, in which the discomfort people feel over the fact of having an animal body is projected outwards onto vulnerable people and groups. These reactions are irrational … both because they embody an aspiration to be a kind of being that one is not, and because, in the process of pursuing that aspiration, they target others for gross harms.
Where law is concerned, it is especially important that a pluralistic democratic society protect itself against such projection-reactions, which have been at the root of gross evils throughout history, prominently including misogyny, anti-Semitism, and loathing of homosexuals. Thus while the law may rightly admit the relevance of indignation, as a moral response appropriate to good citizens and based upon reasons that can be publicly shared, it will do well to cast disgust onto the garbage heap where it would like to cast so many of us.”
(12)
Nussbaum advances a robust liberal repudiation of those legal thinkers (13) who attempt to recruit disgust as a form of legitimate social glue, a necessary element in the cohesion of ‘the’ community, even when no one has been harmed or even witnessed the disgusting act as a third party. She notes that there have been recent attempts by apparently liberal thinkers to use disgust in this way (she mentions the communitarian liberal Daniel Kahan, but we need only think of the unprecedented deluge of new laws unleashed by the UK’s New Labour since it came to power in 1997, many of them disgust-motivated); but law permeated by this toxic and irrational emotion in the service of communitarian aims will inevitably be draconian and highly corrosive to individual liberty.
Moreover, disgust flatly ignores the need to make reparation which a wrong-doer may feel in the wake of a misdemeanour; instead, it stridently demands the penalty of vengeful humiliation (and when the wish for humiliation rules, reparation is foreclosed – reintegration into society is not the aim, permanent exclusion is). Convicted offenders, including sex offenders, in some parts of America are obliged to place bumper-stickers on their cars declaring their status to all and sundry. New Labour has enthusiastically introduced measures to publicly identify people given community sentences by forcing them to wear brightly coloured jackets labelled ‘Community Payback’. Shame is intrinsically disproportionate. If anger requires some form of proportionate restitution to right the wrong, disgust requires the shaming of the entire person. Its sole aim is the removal, even the obliteration, of human dignity. Unlike mere embarrassment, it is never amusing, it is far less reversible and it can be literally lethal, as the suicides provoked by Operation Ore and its sequelea poignantly show. Sexual shame easily hardens, to use a somewhat phallic (though not entirely inappropriate) term, into permanent stigmatisation - for example, being condemned to spend the rest of one’s life on a Sex Offender’s Register for nothing more than looking at pictures, effectively ensuring permanent removal from society and relegation to a barely habitable zone of abjection. Nussbaum firmly believes that a humane system of justice should resolutely protect its citizens from shame, and should never wield it in the name of community cohesion or righteousness.
Whilst we often experience it apparently involuntarily and spontaneously, disgust is an emotion which is nonetheless intimately complicit with some especially vicious sociopolitical hierarchies. Following the work of Klein, my contention is that the anger and indignation we may feel at a deliberate wrong perpetrated on a human being as result of another’s indifference, sadism or egotism are essentially depressive position responses, whereas disgust and shame are far more rooted in the paranoid-schizoid position. And since the paranoid-schizoid position is closely associated with madness, violence and excess, it is a very bad foundation for any form of public law. When this does happen, paranoid-schizoid states of mind can easily lead to a paranoid-schizoid State.
Disgust and Compulsory Illiteracy (Hiding from Humanity): Why we should ‘de-mean’ sex
Anthropologists have often noted a metaphorical parallel between the human body and the social body. The ‘higher’ levels of society try to keep a distance from the (dirty, contaminating) lower orders, just as in polite company we do not talk about the products and activities of the lower parts of our bodies. An individual’s socialisation takes place over a single life-time, with key beliefs being inculcated in the early years especially. Beliefs which have been passively absorbed as ‘common sense’ or ‘normal’ are notoriously difficult to call into question, an essential mechanism which dominant ideologies (14) depend on for their relative success in maintaining social stability – what is thereby becomes what ought to be. But whilst an individual may acquire these beliefs in the course of a single lifetime, the beliefs themselves evolve over much longer time spans: what, and who, gets to count as disgusting has often been categorised as such for centuries. Received wisdom, though potentially deeply irrational, can nonetheless appear in individual minds as unquestionable axioms.
We are strange and divided creatures; other animals are less fastidious about zoning the body in this revulsion-dominated way – giraffes do not appear to get embarrassed when they defecate al fresco in full view of others, even if these are simply other giraffes. Whilst I am not suggesting that we should become more giraffe-like in this respect, I do think that Nussbaum is onto something when she deems our attempts to deny our animality and mortality (a quest which inevitably involves attributing them to someone else) an impossible project. However, I think she does not quite convince when she insists that it is primarily an aversion to slime, *bleep* and putrescence which generates all varieties of disgust. She begins to get at the deeper cause when discussing the critical reception of D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Walt Whitman’s poetry. All met with the most devout and zealous disgust upon original publication. Nussbaum cites an example of an early review of Ulysses, which contains a condemnation of the book’s ‘leprous and scabrous horrors’ and the assertion that ‘All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flow of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words.’ As Nussbaum eloquently notes:
“Joyce believed that our disgust with our own bodily functions lay at the root of many social evils, including nationalism, fanaticism, and misogyny. Like Lawrence he held that a healthy society would be one that comes to grips with its own mortal bodily nature and does not shrink from it in disgust. Joyce’s novel, of course, is the opposite of disgusting to anyone who reads it as it asks to be read. Like Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it presents the body as an object of many emotions – desire, humor, tender love, calm acceptance. But one emotion that is conspicuously absent from both writers … is disgust. The novels of Joyce and Lawrence were found disgusting precisely because the society that read them was so deeply in the grip of a kind of loathing of its own animality that it could not actually read the works.”
(15)
Nussbaum hints at something here which she fails to follow up, a failure which ultimately leads her to endorse the censorious and disgust-laden views of anti-pornography zealots such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (pornography ‘objectifies’ the female body; I think there is much more to it than this, a ‘much more’ which allows me to accept much of the MacKinnon-Dworkin analysis of pornography, but to draw diametrically opposite conclusions). Nussbaum remains bound by a liberal perspective - a more capacious, tolerant and intelligent outlook than the coercive moralists of communitarian conformity could ever come up with, but a liberal perspective nonetheless, with its inevitable limitations and blind-spots. Liberal views of human sexuality tend to regard it as alloyed to love, respect for personhood and long-term monogamous intimacy. There is a margin of deviant and perverse sexual behaviour and immorality, to be sure, but the centre is wholesome and good when these principals are adhered to.
As Leo Bersani has astutely observed, the weakness in the argument is how such a wholesomely good centre came to produce such perverse margins in the first place. It is the adherence to an anodyne, vapidly inadequate model of sexuality which is the problem, and which perhaps accounts for the illiteracy Nussbaum hints at above. And it is precisely the compulsoriness, the symptomatically reiterated insistence, that sexuality can and must be redeemed and pastoralised into a bland, insipid, polite niceness that ultimately generates witch-hunts and sexual fascism. What cannot be integrated into this model – the polymorphous, Dionysian, spiciness of sex – has to be projected onto ‘outsiders’. In other words, an inextricable and intrinsic aspect of human sexuality is, through the magical thinking characteristic of paranoid-schizoid fantasising, placed in the perverted margins in order to keep the wholesome centre pure. If this is the meaning of sex, it is high time that we de-meaned it, as those human beings unfortunate enough to get placed in the ‘disgusting’ margins (or perhaps, at the ‘bottom’ of the social body) get treated by the centre or ‘higher strata’ exactly like *bleep*.
It is the final sentence of the quotation from Nussbaum which we might productively pursue further: these books were found disgusting because the society considering them was “so deeply in the grip of a … loathing of its own animality that it could not actually read the works” in a way that they asked to be read. Another way of putting this is to say that socially dominant sexual disgust causes a kind of radical illiteracy, a fraught inability and refusal to receive these authors’ work in a ‘meaning-full’ way. To reduce work of this subtlety and complexity to ‘filth’ requires a considerable amount of violence. But the violence is of a particular nature, not simply what Freud might have called ‘repression’, because this implies a kind of remediable deceit. Repression involves taking in what we do not wish to know about and then hiding it from any further conscious processing, so that it comes back disguised as a symptom; but this kind of symptom is at least theoretically available to conscious appraisal – to truth – if we can overcome our resistances. It sits inside our protestations of disgust and outrage, making them ever more vehement, but threatening all the time to slip out in the form of a bungled comment or a disturbing dream. The violence of disgust is closer to psychosis than neurosis: it involves a much more absolute and profound form of refusal than repression. It involves a frantic and terrified rejection, an expulsion which one highly innovative reader of Freud called ‘foreclosure.’ When a system of cultural meaning uses foreclosure to block and kill meaningful elaboration, it is, in one theorist’s diagnostic view, psychotic.
Perhaps now is a good moment to introduce you, if you have not already met him, to Jacques Lacan. The loathing-induced illiteracy Nussbaum refers to may have less to do with *bleep* and slime than with what Lacan called jouissance, a form of excessive, mad enjoyment that obliterates the distinctions between pleasure and pain, subject and object, self and other. I also think that secret jouissance accounts for the refractoriness of some forms of projective identification, especially that which is socially and politically mandated – sadistically ‘othering’ groups of human beings through the malicious lie of projective identification offers an addictive charge of occult, obscene enjoyment to those doing the projecting: it inevitably positions them in a one-way street, top down model of domination and power.
Social Reality: a regulative fiction
It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that, throughout this work, I have been exploring how a radical psychoanalysis might help us to bring into being a more enabling and generous vocabulary to think about sexuality, and especially children and sexuality, than the one we presently have. Shrill, authoritarian, panic-stricken, disgust-laden and vengeful, it ought to belong to a distantly bygone era; that it is the principal vocabulary of our twenty-first century child protection Jacobins is a lamentable tragedy.
One of the principal reasons why I think we should take Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis seriously is that he offers us a means of transcending the censorious authoritarianism we now know as ‘political correctness’; and since this is at its most extreme and, frankly, lethal, in the field of human sexual variation, Lacan’s thought has never been so urgent, so necessary, than in our present moment. By taking language, and language disturbance, seriously, Lacan offers us the possibility of a better fit between the symbolic world and the animal world of the human body.
We are accustomed to thinking of madness and mental abnormality as the unfortunate fate of a small number of individuals who have ‘lost touch with reality.’ The focus on the individual mind and its relation to ‘social reality’ is, of course, the bread and butter of most clinical psychologies and psychiatry. But there is a colossal piece of ideology at work in this assumption: who is to decide what constitutes being ‘in touch’ with ‘reality’ and what precisely might that reality be?
Conventional psychology, which is too often an ideology masquerading as a science, simply ignores this question. It assumes that our dominant political regime of normalcy is the best of all possible worlds, rendering anyone deviating or straying from it, especially sexually, as abnormal, pathological or wicked. Or, more hubristically, it concedes that earlier times had different moral codes, but regards them as products of ignorance and prejudice on the behalf of our benighted ancestors, who suffered the misfortune of not being able to read any cognitive behavioural manuals. It does not seem to occur to them that such an attitude not only reduces Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Swift to myopic primitives who haven’t seen the light but elevates the hosts of trashy ‘spill-your-guts-on-TV’ shows to contemporary prophets. We would have to believe that Oprah is more advanced than Orwell.
Today, our enlightened liberal totalitarians believe they can impose their world view on everyone else partly because, in the field of sexuality at least, the results of their crudely reductionist, primitively empiricist psychologism endorses their ideological preferences, ‘proving’ that the dreary sexual moralism they seek to enforce on all is True and right (the capital T signals that repressive coercion will inevitably be deployed). This is psychology as ventriloquism, an observation made be Leo Bersani (16): the questions it asks are devised to come up with the answers (and the social strategies) it has already formulated. It may be absurd to rule out an empirical court of appeal to balance and test ideological assertions; but it is equally nonsensical to convert empirical observation into the religion of empiricism. We would do well to remember Einstein’s remark that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.
Cure, from the perspective of psychological normalism, means correcting errant ways; it inevitably involves ‘training courses’ and ‘programmes’, dogmatic, formulaic indoctrination schemes which effectively treat human beings as though they were circus seals or performing bears, all aimed at getting the wayward deviant ‘back on track’. Back onto that nice, polite, liberal-totalitarian track, of course, where, it seems, everyone ought to be; even if, as Stephen Fry once remarked, tracks are simply upturned ruts (an observation which applies as much to our contemporary regime of illiberal liberalism as it does to vulgar Stalinism or theocratic fundamentalism).
We are living in times where ‘leftist liberalism’ now means little other than bossy authoritarianism, the attempt to establish compulsory codes of brittle, mannered politeness through frenetic criminal legislation and to interfere more and more intrusively in private behaviour (don’t smoke, don’t take any drugs, ever, don’t drink, don’t say anything which might cause ‘offense’, don’t have fun). This is a liberalism which sedulously sacrifices liberty and freedom of speech to law and order (‘security’) or ‘respect’ (not offending anybody) and which casts classical liberals, who cherish free speech and abjure statist regulation, as nasty conservatives. With intolerant tolerance and punitive politeness in power, we are perhaps entitled to ask: under such circumstances is ‘abnormality’ always a sign of madness? If certain social norms can be shown to be mad, does our adherence to them make us crazy or sane, even if our conformity makes us normal? Is sanity normalcy?
It seems to me that the psychologies of the rational individual are not only wholly unable to answer these questions: they can’t even ask them. If we cannot question what we take to be our social foundations, how the rich man came to live in a castle with the poor man at his gate, or the liberal totalitarian in her ivory tower with the deviants tidied away in prison, the status quo rules: innovation, liberty, and growth have always come from scepticism, struggle and defiance, and never from the benevolent generosity of the ruling order. Freedom has always been won through struggle, defiance and intelligent scepticism; it has never been bestowed by benevolent rulers (being charitable to the lower orders is simply a form of tutelage). If what we call reality is a ‘social construction’ or ‘representation’, we are entitled to ask: whose construction or representation has the most merit? Or, if everything that develops in our lives is already encoded and rooted in an unchanging essential nature, what precisely is this essence made of? DNA? Inborn or God-given codes of righteousness?
With the facile binary opposites which govern these questions in place, we may never be able to go beyond the increasingly sterile, fruitless (and numbingly boring) stand-off between the nature/nurture, constructionism/essentialism arguments of the last two or three decades. Whilst I appreciate that he may bring a groan of frustration or simply puzzlement to many, I think Jacques Lacan offers a most productive route out of these interminable and enervating disputes.
To be moral you must be normal; but to be sane, you must embrace your eccentricity
For Lacan, the answer to the question of what determines our desires - nature or nurture - is: neither. If we are animals, we are also talking animals, and it is our capacity for language which makes all the difference. Language enables us to compose symphonies, epic poems and peer into the cosmos with exquisitely sophisticated telescopes. But, to borrow an image from the late American psychoanalyst, Ernest Becker, despite our almost limitless capabilities in art, literature, and technology, we have mortal, animal bodies; all of us, politicians and prisoners, prudes and perverts, have a small opening in our rears from which foul-smelling gases and waste solids emerge. We may be god-like in our achievements, but we all still have to take a *bleep*, and, eventually, like all animals, die – a curious combination which effectively makes us ‘gods with arseholes’, in Becker’s memorable phrase (17).
We can only try to fit our animal bodies as well as we can into the language systems we grow up in. For Lacan, the fit is never going to be perfect, but some language systems (systems of cultural meaning, which he calls the Big Other) may be better than others, in that their vocabularies, their repertoire of ‘signifiers’, may be more generous and capacious than others. But even so, there will always be a kind of excess, a tiny morsel of bodily experience which we can never quite capture in language even though we might have no alternative but to keep on trying to do so. Lacan saw this little scrap of fleshly sensation, this morsel of bodily jouissance which falls away from us and remains forever beyond our reach as soon as we submit to the laws of language, as the very thing that causes our desire. We can find it nowhere but we seek it everywhere. When I feel I’m getting close to it, possibly when I’ve become spellbound by the colour of your eyes, or the shine of your hair, a kind of jubilant enchantment arises –‘it’, that missing, blissful ‘X’ that I can’t quite describe, seems ‘in you more than you’, to use Lacan’s phrase. However, as soon as I feel I ‘have’ it, I find that it has mysteriously migrated elsewhere. It keeps desire perpetually on the move.
In becoming linguistic animals, we sacrifice a degree of our primordial animality. Or rather, Lacan seems to be saying that our agreement to submit to the laws of syntax, grammar and linguistic intelligibility, upon which our membership of human communities depends, retroactively creates a powerful fantasy of blissful, boundless, pleasurable fusion with the (m)other – a sense of a limitless enjoyment which language forces us to give up. There’d be no need to learn to speak and communicate if we were forever in a state of seamless communion. This primary estrangement, this ineluctable alienation produced by our assuming linguistic (human) status, will haunt us forevermore. Lacan came to call this estranged, lost, enigmatic scrap of jouissance ‘object petit a’ (or ‘object little a’ in English, where ‘a’ stands for ‘autre’, the French for ‘other’). In a characteristically evocative passage, he writes:
“The a, the object, falls. That fall is primal. The diversity of forms taken by that object of the fall ought to be related to the manner in which the desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject.”
(19)
Tim Dean, a brilliant Lacan scholar whose superb book of 2000 brings Lacan’s psychoanalysis directly into conversation with contemporary sexual emancipation (“queer”) theories, notes that the concept of ‘object a’ fully “recognises the diversity of forms that erotic desire may take” (20). Moralists, of course, will be less than pleased with such argumentation. Lacan was scathing about what some have called heteronormativity (and which I prefer to call neurotic moralism), because those championing a spurious normality as a badge of honour were inevitably involved in a monumental deceit, not least toward themselves. And, from a psychoanalytic point of view, self deceit, the ways in which we refuse to know what we could know about our desires, is where all subsequent deception begins. Neurotic moralism tries to attribute to outside forces everything that it refuses to integrate; the sane eccentricity Lacan urges us to embrace simply requires to us to stop lying about our polymorphous and diverse erotic desires and find good ways of living with them.
For all who have been victimised or simply made weary by the demands of normalcy, this apparently small insight might repay closer consideration. If desire is not pre-ordained, if the ground upon which the sex police and the sex adjudicators stand is removed from beneath their feet (as I believe both Freud and Lacan have actually done, which is almost certainly why they are so radically ignored), we are left with a contingency, a universal contingency, perhaps, but a contingency nonetheless. For it is clear when you read him that Lacan did not believe that this determining piece of bodily jouissance, this lost thing which causes our desire, had anything to do with gender, age, class or any other form of rank. We might all have to experience it, as we all have to enter language; but the way in which we do so is highly idiomatic. And as we have seen, the multiple forms that this lost jouissance may take is indeterminable and irreducible to gender difference, age similarity, skin colour, or even whole persons (the penis, the breast, buttock, belly button, and so on – the list is endless – can all be seen as potential repositories for object little a).
For Lacan, conventional social reality is imaginary and normalcy is too often a form of pathological conformity. To be sane, as opposed to normal, one must seek out and embrace one’s repudiated and repressed otherness, one’s eccentricity to social convention. Only then can we lead full lives. But if you can be sane whilst estranged from social ‘reality’, you are mad when you refuse – foreclose - meaningful signifiers.
Social psychosis
It is quite impossible (and probably quite mad) to attempt to give a coherent account of Lacan’s thought: he was suspicious of systematising endeavours because he felt that we could seduce ourselves all too easily into thinking that we were masters of reality, monarchs of knowledge. Such conceited certainties pave the road to tyranny, usually in the name of Progress. The unconscious for Lacan, as for Freud, qualified all such claims to mastery, rendering them ultimately specious and riddled with self-deceit. His writing is extraordinarily difficult to comprehend but I do not think that this was simply the result of a wish to be mysterious or obscure in order to circumvent critical scrutiny, as some of his more pre-emptively hostile critics have alleged. I think he was requiring us to engage with his work by tolerating uncertainty and even incomprehension, and by regarding enlightenment as an endless and infinite process.
In a brilliant essay summarising an earlier year-long seminar (Lacan improvised a series of spontaneous seminars every year in front of a live audience – he was hardly toeing a line or following an orthodoxy), he more than hints at the possibility that a social order can be psychotic, not merely a few crazed individuals (18). Taking issue with those scientists, including psychoanalysts, who believe they ‘know’ what reality is, he is scathing about their unquestioning adoption of prevalent social assumptions, many of which Lacan regards as delusional (just because a large number of people believe in Father Christmas does not make the belief sane). He writes:
“There is no doubt that such a [social] psychosis may turn out to be compatible with what is called an orderly state of affairs, but that does not authorise the psychiatrist, even if he is a psychoanalyst, to trust in his own compatibility with this orderly state to believe that he is in possession of an adequate idea of the reality to which his patient supposedly proves to be unequal.”
(21)
At the time Lacan wrote this (1959), it was the deluded normalcy he refers to which enabled homophobic clinicians to pervert psychoanalysis and use it to classify gay and lesbian people as psychiatrically sick and morally twisted. Lacan would have nothing to do with such crude categorisations, which he regarded simply as the misapplication of popular prejudice to clinical practise and, by definition, thoroughly anti-psychoanalytic. He totally repudiated the view that psychiatrists and psychologists could ever assume that they were in a position to ‘know’ reality better than anyone else, or that patients had strayed too far away from it. For Lacan, this was the height of arrogant self-deception. Boorish, under-educated sex policemen would be dismayed to find that their doltish parroting of sex offender ‘treatment’ manuals would be regarded by Lacan as nothing more than a stupid, self-aggrandising confidence trick.
So what did psychosis mean for Lacan? To be a little mischievous with ordinary language for a moment, from a Lacanian point of view madness has nothing to do with straying too far from (linguistically manufactured) social norms, and everything to do with a terrifying proximity to what he called ‘the Real.’
Madness has nothing to do with the refusal of ‘reality’ (it’s the refusal of words we have to worry about)
How can we know if someone (or a system of beliefs) is sane or mad, as opposed to merely normal? Lacan suggests that in order to find the answer to this question, or rather, in order to pose this question in the first place, we need to drop the ideology of the individual, conscious ego, master of all it surveys, just as Freud had done. With this ideology in control, all we are left with is measuring the extent of deviation from socio-political norms, which has the perverse effect of elevating normotic pathology, which we saw in the last chapter is a dire state of robotic conformity, into the essential benchmark of psychic health.
In Lacan’s radical return to Freud’s texts, he brought out the pivotal role of language in Freud’s scintillatingly original discoveries about human subjectivity. We are animals sharing a great deal of our DNA with other species. But as speaking, writing and reading animals, animals capable of art, we inevitably become animals governed by symbols far more than by instincts. However, whatever we cannot translate into words, whatever dimension of experience resists our efforts to symbolise it, will insist as symptom, as cause of our desire and as dream (Lacan called this dimension ‘the Real’).
To return to Lacan’s 1959 article on psychosis, we can see that he was working on isolating a structural difference between psychotic and neurotic subjects. He was already very aware that psychotic patients exhibited severe language disturbances: language functioned very differently in the psychotic subject to the way it functioned in the neurotic. The latter, whilst having to submit to the rules of grammar and semantics, could nonetheless use language creatively and meaningfully, too. Neurotics (i.e. ordinary people) have a degree of linguistic agency and can creatively exploit the inevitable ambiguities of language. Psychoanalytic interpretation itself relies on this – it is a kind of generative redescription of a previously frozen storyline, restoring some much needed loose ends (and, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once put it “ … the looser beginnings”: we may never be able to change the historical events of our lives but we can subsequently change the meanings we attribute to them (22)).
Psychotics have none of this capacity. Whilst they may be completely baffled about what a comment or word might mean, they are nonetheless convinced that it does mean something very specific, and that whatever it is, it is directed at them, even if it has taken the form of an auditory hallucination. There can be no ambiguity; uncannily like the stripped down, cartoon, good guy/bad guy psychology beloved of child protection fanatics, psychotics live in a ‘this means that’ world, although a world in which even this precarious and brittle certainty is under perpetual threat of catastrophic dissolution. This is one reason why psychotics cannot be persuaded to relinquish a delusion: the delusional system is all that is holding them together.
Lacan believed that the future psychotic had foreclosed something utterly vital: a symbol he called ‘the Name of the Father’ or the ‘paternal metaphor’. This foreclosure (a most violent expulsion) occurred at a critical moment, more of a logical moment than a chronological one developmentally, but critical nonetheless. To return to mothers and babies for an instant: Lacan believed that we all, as infants, begin to sense at some point that we are not, as we had previously assumed, the sole focus of the mother’s desire. And this begins to intrigue and torment us. Whilst we subsequently fictionalise the era before this moment of anxious intrigue as a time of joy and blissful communion, Lacan suggests that it was never so: we were faced throughout it with the ineradicably troubling question of what, precisely, we are in the (m)other’s desire? What does she see in me, want from me? Just as we begin to have doubts about whether we can fulfil her wants (and what those wants are), we notice that her desire keeps going elsewhere - and perhaps this is an occasion for some relief as well as disillusionment. And elsewhere is where the father is located.
For Lacan, this recognition of the place and role of the father, which does not have to be the natural father or even a male, is pivotal for the path we subsequently go on to take. Father starts to break up the union between mother and infant: his function is to step between us, prohibiting the fantasy of endless fusion and inviting us to become separate, symbol-using subjects in our own right. Where identity and sameness was, a triangle appears: you, me and him (or her). We all struggle with this: he frustrates our desire to be the sole object of the (m)other’s desire, but relieves us of the burden of assuming that role. We get a chance to use the space he opens up for us to identify ourselves as beings separate from the mother. I notice that I am referring to father as ‘he’ – an example, perhaps, of how difficult it is to release oneself from deeply sedimented social assumptions. Lacan is reworking Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, but he does it in a radically innovative way. Unlike Freud, who did not have access to the field of structural linguistics that Lacan was immersed in, the Lacanian father is not a person, but a signifier, a metaphor. The father is, in Lacan’s model, the symbolic position where the mother locates her desire.
At this point we seriously start to wonder what he’s got that we haven’t. And we come to think that he has (or is) that ‘X’ we looked at a moment or so ago. To begin with we try to draw the mother’s desire back onto ourselves – we try to get her to believe that we are/have ‘X’ - before reaching the conclusion (if we’re fortunate) that, with the father in position, we haven’t got a chance (23). We have to come up with an alternative strategy.
For Lacan, this struggle over ‘X’ (object little a), takes a momentous turn: our alternative strategy, eventually, is to let go of the idea that ‘X’ is a really existing, material thing or property, such as a penis or big muscles, and see that it is actually a symbol of what the mother lacks (she would not desire if she were not missing something). This substitution, symbol for thing, marks our entry into language: this is the principle of signification, of speech and language. Meaning is constantly deferred until I have completed my statement (we often don’t know what someone is getting at until they’ve finished talking); my words are always substitutes for things. And I will never be able to complete all my statements, to speak the whole truth, to bring about speculative closure, in effect, until death silences me (and even then, people can continue to speculate about what I really meant).
However, the acceptance of the symbolic father, the paternal metaphor, anchors something: whilst inevitably ambiguous, words also convey meaning: some meanings seem tied or quilted to the words signifying them. We would be permanently unintelligible to one another were it not for this ‘quilting’ effect produced by certain important symbols. Without this tie, words and meanings would either come adrift and slide all over the place, producing semantic disintegration, or in a desperate effort to stave off such dissolution, adhere to one another so frantically and rigidly that signifier and signified, word and thing, become equivalent and literally identical. A psychotic hearing the word ‘stool’ will find it hard to distinguish between a piece of furniture and a turd.
It is the paternal metaphor, which we can think of more broadly as a meaningful signifier (or cluster of signifiers), which the psychotic radically and primally refuses. And this refusal has terrible consequences. Language might frustrate us, and convince us that we have had an original deep enjoyment taken away from us. But, even though this deep enjoyment is itself an effect of language (rather than an antecedent), as linguistic creatures we require a safe, protective barrier to stand between us and ‘it’, just as we needed the paternal metaphor to mitigate and separate our mad desire for exclusive, eternal fusion with the mother. We are mad when we believe we can have direct, unmediated access to ‘it’, the ‘Real.’ What bars us (and preserves us) from unmediated jouissance is the word.
Lacan’s view is, of course, radically different from that of our ruling victimologists. For Lacan, trauma is constitutive: it is the condition of possibility for becoming linguistic subjects and it is generative as well as limiting (we get to be agents in language). Our refusal to accede to it is liable to make us psychotic (the victimologist view is that trauma only happens when nasty men do horrible things to women and children).
When I was a schoolboy, a rather strict (but actually very good) ‘metalwork’ teacher displayed a large leather belt in his workshop. It had painted on it the phrase “For when words fail.” Needless to say, he had no discipline problems (he was actually a rather nice man). But to take his phrase seriously, the failure of words can make us excessively violent – far more so than other animals.
Tim Dean takes this notion, along with Lacan’s suggestion that a social order can be functionally psychotic, very seriously: if the refusal of meaningful signifiers in an individual leads to psychosis, the refusal of meaningful signifiers by a dominant social order leads to a far more widespread madness:
“I’m claiming that Lacan redefines psychosis in terms of the loss of the signifier, rather than the loss of “reality.” Yet I’m also claiming that in order to understand what this means we need to look at what Lacan does with the theory of the real – which designates not reality but the point at which the signifier fails.”
(24)
‘The point at which the signifier fails’ is the point where jouissance (the unsymbolisable ‘real’) threatens to erupt, but via projective identification, it is immediately perceived as an external threat to our decent, civilised, moral way of life. Following Dean, my contention is that signifiers always fail precisely at those cultural fault lines which defy dominant narratives of unity (such as ‘the community’) and innocence (such as the imaginary child). Sexual children? Community psychosis beckons (as does murderous suppression).
Chapter 6 continued.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:47 AM by Editor
Updated on 04/10/2009 09:28 AM by Editor
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