Counter Erotics

...it's as if one morning millions of people woke up to find that they possessed something none of them had ever suspected themselves of having before: a gender identity. Not since the invention of sexual orientation had a new kind of fact about personhood so suddenly and insistently announced itself. The cisgendered, as they now knew themselves, had something unexpected to account for: in addition to the sexed bodies they seemed to have, and the gendered social roles they played with greater or lesser enthusiasm, a new truth had appeared...

For "democratic materialism", Badiou says, "nothing exists but bodies and languages". There are male and female bodies (and a few other kinds, given that nature does not always colour within the lines drawn by medical classification). There are masculine and feminine personae, social roles, each with its own proper idiom. It is conventional for male-bodied persons to perform in the masculine idiom and for female-bodied persons to perform in the feminine idiom, but the rule of democratic materialism decrees that languages should aim for a maximum of performative freedom, dynamically reconfiguring the bodies that support them: let there be white rappers, black CEOs, Burberry-clad delinquents, privately-educated Trotskyites with impeccably flat vowels. (I am not arguing that there should not be any of these things, only that they do not in themselves represent a break with the logic of democratic materialism as such). "Femininities" and "masculinities" proliferate beyond even the encyclopaedic competence of J. Jack Halberstam. We are subject, in effect, to two contradictory imperatives: to know one's place (to perform as expected, to uphold convention), and to be versatile (to retool, re-skill, re-orientate oneself in response to fresh requirements). Defiance of the first imperative is always only a few breaths away from recuperation as obedience to the second (the contestants in RuPaul's Drag Race are virtuosi of self-fashioning, but they are not gender subversives in the old-fashioned sense).

It's understandable that the iconoclastic "gender atheism" of radical feminism should attempt a rescue of the body, in its authentic and original integrity, from the clutches of language (that is, from the gendered symbolic law). What the "masculine" and "feminine" idioms perform is first of all power: the power of bodies coded in one way over bodies coded in another, or the self-yielding receptivity of one kind of body to the self-asserting potency embodied in the other. There's plenty in those dynamics to ooh and aah over, but the routine gets tired - even if the performers are allowed to switch roles on special occasions. "Our bodies, ourselves" is a slogan which offers to re-situate selfhood in the body where it lives, prior to its alienation and disfiguration by the law of gender. But the body is not immediately a self, and the life of the self is not immediately identical with the life of the body; to link the two requires an identification.

Nothing exists but bodies and languages, Badiou says, except that there are also truths. A truth is a novel supplement, a "plus-one" which unbalances the structure into which it is inserted. There isn't a place in the sexed-bodies/gender-roles system for gender identity. On the one side, it seems to "naturalise" gender, to make it an attribute of bodies, which is absurd: gender is a social construct, which we are forbidden on pain of being spoken to like small children to "essentialise". When we try to add gender to the body, we get something spiritualised and chimerical like "brain sex", which plainly won't do (as Cordelia Fine will tell you). On the other side, the notion of gender identity threatens to "culturalise" the body, to dematerialise "biological sex", making it an artifact of language, subject to volition, a performative will-o'-the-wisp. Neither our sense of bodily potency nor our awareness of bodily vulnerability can survive such a translation. At first sight, this supplement's chances in the world as it is look slim.

It is, however, necessary to think gender identity, and it is necessary because an event has occurred: something that existed absolutely minimally in the world, that was treated as a phantom or a bit of a joke, has come to exist with singular force. When trans people talk about their "right to exist", I believe that they are not only talking about the murderous violence that is so often directed against them, or about their continuing struggle for rights and access to appropriate medical care: it's my belief that this phrase also concerns that fact that trans people no longer exist minimally in this world, and will never again be reduced to inexistence. (I should acknowledge a problem with this way of putting it, which is that it seems to equate social "inexistence", or extreme marginalisation, with personal "inexistence", or a lack of selfhood. It's possible to know with great urgency who you are, and at the same time experience a kind of social death - John Clare's "I am: yet what I am none cares or knows" speaks powerfully of the anguish of being in this position. Existence or inexistence is always relative to some particular world. That which inexists in some particular world - the social world of mutual care and recognition - can nevertheless contain worlds within itself, as any introvert will tell you).

So, here - from the perspective of someone whose gender identity is cis - is a rough sketch. For a self to identify as the self of a body, for a body to recognise itself as (having) a self, some identification must occur. Lacan sees this identification as taking place in the "mirror stage" - the infant sees itself in the mirror, and through the medium of its reflection comes to connect its stimuli and motor impulses with a wriggling being that appears all of a piece. But we don't have to rely on Lacan to talk about this. Among the ways the body regulates its own movements in space is through the mechanism of proprioception, a sense we have of where the various bits of us are in relation to each other. Proprioception is not perception - you can do it with your eyes shut - but it is part of how the body has a sense of itself as a body in space, and at the same time part of how the self has a sense of itself as embodied and as having some control over "its" body. The point is this: the body-self (somato-psychic) circuit passes through all kinds of mediating mechanisms, some "internal" like proprioception, some "external" like self-perception (with or without the assistance of a mirror). You can't collapse those circuits and obtain an instantaneous identity of self and body. They aren't separable things - neither is itself without the other -  but they're not the same thing either.

White pornography is non-violent, female-friendly. It makes a certain use of light: not to expose, but to soften exposure. Sunlight streams in from a large apartment window; bodies are bathed in a gentle incandescence. Everyone is healthy, with healthy skin, porcelain-pale or naturally tanned (but rarely black: "race" doesn't belong here, which means that everyone is white or white enough). It takes a long time to have sex. There is a lot of kissing and staring at each other: the clothes don't all come off at once. If you fast-forward past the foreplay, what you get is "vanilla" sex, the sort that some people call love-making (the title may refer to it as "passionate", which means plenty of eye-contact, open-mouthed but never full-throated gasps of pleasure, encouraging glances over the shoulder). Post-coitally, more kissing, stroking, an ambience of satisfaction, on which we fade out. The titles are in a nice font. White pornography could pass for "erotica", and has ambitions towards "art". It is systematically unobjectionable: even the genitals are pleasant to look at, or at least not unpleasant.

White pornography eschews the overt symbolisation of dominance: what's being acted out is mutual pleasure, the sex of angels. Nobody is pushed towards any extremity. This is not a world in which it is anyone's erotic destiny to suffer, to be forced and broken. At most a light film of sweat. We remain at all times within the charmed circle, all ethical worries dismissed. No slaps, no choking, no anal. Sex is good, a form of leisure, like lying in warm sunlight. We could be watching an educational video: this is how you do it, or how you'd do it if time and money weren't a worry, if neither of you had any hang-ups or weird damage, if you had a nice apartment and fresh linen and good nutrition and an exercise regime that really worked for you.

I imagine Gail Dines watching white pornography, with pencil in hand and a checklist of atrocities, waiting in vain for some manifest evil to transpire. Could you even get addicted to this stuff? There's no gradient you could roll down into the muck of the id, the tarpit of compulsion. There is, because this is still pornography, the prescribed close-up of penis going in and out of vagina, which lasts long enough to be boring: these people are paid to act, and we want to see their faces. The "objectification" is almost apologetic - of course we had to put this in, we're still beholden to the genre. But it's not the fetishistic frenzy of gendered rage, the relentless pounding, the destruction of healthy organs. No-one's going to wind up incontinent.

What is white pornography? In a word, disavowal. It's the job of pornography to be guilty of everything, to be "eroticised inequality", the shameful glorification of the worst. Pornography unveils the sexism in sex, the racism in race, the social harm in private pleasure. Or it shows, exposes, how private pleasure is already a vector of social harm, never merely private and never altogether harmless. No matter how pro-sex you think you are, there's always some pornography that's just a bit too much, just inexcusibly retrograde, not just fascinatingly "problematic" but outright nasty and indefensible. (When you defend pornography, you do so on the grounds that it's not all like that - sure a lot of the mainstream stuff is dreck, but look, there's this queer porn that's totally rad, ethical even: what we need is more good porn like that, we need to educate people...)

White pornography is porn without pain, porn for white people, porn that won't guilt-trip you by reminding you of the shame of being a man or the inequities that (we know, we know...) affect every human social relationship. It's as if someone looked at regular porn, with all of its morally disquieting power-gradients and unsightly aggression, and decided that it was inefficient: all that libido leaking out into questionable cathexes, as if someone had jabbed a cattle-prod into the nerve-centre of kyriarchy and every axis of oppression was spasming at once. A programme of rationalisation is in order: we must eliminate every mark of social difference, everything that might arouse suspicion: make it two women if you have to. White pornography is whitened pornography, Friends with benefits, the erotic safe haven of people who don't want to even imagine being poor.

Genres are not to be mixed.

I will not mix genres.

I repeat, genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.

Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves.

- Jacques Derrida, The Law of Genre

Let's say, for the sake of compressing a complex array of arguments into the form of a slogan, that for radical feminism gender is the law. To say that "gender is the law" is to make an assertion that is simultaneously about the kind of thing gender is, and about the kind of power gender has.

Firstly, gender is the law because is belongs to the sphere of nomos - of legal custom - rather than the sphere of phusis, or "nature". Gender is not immediately a physical attribute of persons, but rather a trait that is assigned to persons on the basis of a legal distinction. This is not to say that gender is not also physically marked, but that the "physics" of gender, the way it plays out in the domain of bodies and gestures, is determined by gender norms that are "cultural" rather than "natural", expressions of social power rather than of biology. Another way of saying this would be to say that gender is "shaped to" bodies rather than "shaped by" them: it isn't indifferent to physical distinctions, and must to some degree contour itself around them, but it also exercises a shaping power over the bodies that it binds to.

Secondly, gender is the law because it acts as a kind of metaphysical invariant governing both social reality and the radical feminist critique of that reality. In other words, just as there is nowhere in our social world that the law of gender does not obtain, so there is no region of radical feminist thought that is not organised around the law of gender (i.e. that does not hold to both m/f and m>f, in Janet Halley's terms). The strength of radical feminism lies in this reciprocal mirroring of the form and object of its critique, and this mirroring is guaranteed by the law of gender. If at any point the law were to break down, either on the side of social reality or on the side of radical feminist thought, then the antagonistic bond between the two sides would also be broken.

At the same time, radical feminism is committed to creating, in the midst of a gendered social reality and in rebellion against it, a political movement which would "abolish the existing state of affairs" - that is, that would undo the law of gender and release the real world of men and women from its bonds. For Andrea Dworkin this meant "androgyny", for Shulamith Firestone the technological reconfiguration of sex to serve the purposes of a Promethean generic humanity. From Dworkin's Intercourse to Sheila Jeffreys's Anticlimax, the prophets of this movement have constructed a variety of eschatological imaginaries, visions of a world-after-gender - often accompanied by fierce admonitions not to mistake any part of the world-that-is for the world-to-come. The first law of the law of gender is that you are always subject to it, regardless of whether or not you think you are.

In sum, the radical feminist is a believer-misbeliever in gender, someone who believes that that law of gender is ubiquitous and ubiquitously powerful, but who also believes that its power is a power of falsehood, that it creates a false world in which one cannot believe.

In its ongoing and often antagonistic relationship to trans politics, radical feminism has found itself ensnared in a complex yet programmatic series of translations, projections and exclusions, each of which has served the underlying purpose of upholding the law of gender - and hence guaranteeing the coherence of radical feminist identity. "Coherence in contradiction always indicates the force of a desire", as Derrida observed in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Humanities, and the theoretical contortions of "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism" (TERF) illustrate this maxim with depressing predictability. Trans people are simultaneously held to illustrate the arbitrariness of the gender system and blamed for reinforcing it, bad dupes of the mirage of gender who insist on believing in it even as it harms them. If only they had wanted to be androgynous, they might have made good radical feminists - that is, good upholder-abolishers of the law of gender, good believer-misbelievers!

What gender is for trans people I cannot say with any authority; they themselves will sometimes say that it works at the level of proprioception (the body's sense of itself in space, its imaginary mapping of its own contours), or of libidinal organisation (what some radical feminists dismissively refer to as "feels"). Some might perhaps be called misbeliever-believers in gender. The law of gender has failed because it has misgendered them; there is something about them that its (arrogantly and wrongly assumed) power of naming cannot command. But it is not clear that this intractable something, whether it is known as "gender identity" or by another name, is entirely the same sort of thing as the legally-imposed pattern of identification and comportment that radical feminism knows as "gender". In other words, it may be that trans activists and radical feminists are talking at cross-purposes when the former talk about the force of identity that resists the law of gender in the name of gender itself, and the latter insist that gender is always and only that which the law of gender compels it to be.

Having spoken of a consent1, we should expect to come in due course to a consent2, consent in a different sense or register to the contractual. Suppose we shift the emphasis away from the consenting1 act, the act which establishes consent-value, and towards consensuality as the state of being in consent2. Here it is not a question of my own autonomous decision that something should be or not be, but of mutual comfort and acquiescence: we are consensual when we are in consent2 with each other. Consensuality is not monologic (a speaker speaks, acts, consents) but dialogic (consensus, fellow-feeling, is sought and found). I cannot consent2 for you, but I also cannot consent2 without you, since the destination I am seeking does not exist unless we are both there.

Consent1 is premised on individual autonomy, and materialised through a speech act in which the speaker is positioned as the bearer of a kind of ideal sovereignty: my body, my law. Consent2 is premised on the irreducible two-ness of the sexual situation: there are (at least) two bodies, (at least) two libidinal economies in play. Now, it is possible to think that the law of this situation can be derived by "adding together" two rulings: I decree thus, and you decree thus, and so consent is established as the reconciliation of two autonomies. Commercial sexual transactions are supposed to work like this: there is no "two" involved, but rather a "one" (who wants something clearly indicable) and another "one" (who agrees, with reference to a tariff of services, to provide it). Money changes hands, and the law is upheld. But it is also possible to think that there is no one law of the situation, no rapporte sexuelle in which our respective roles are given, and that autonomy and heteronomy are superposed in consensuality.

How does this work? In the first instance, we are not talking of "power exchange", the transfer between parties of a single focus of autonomy (I let you decide). The consensual situation is one in which there is no single focus of autonomy: "power" is not concentrated in this fashion; no-one (no "one") is fully "dominant", even temporarily. (Too bad for the fantasists! But they are free to pretend if it pleases them). This does not mean that we are immediately in a situation of "full equality", where no-one has any power whatsoever; rather, it means that both of our powers are entangled, in contention and combination, and that no single power emerges as the output of this engagement.

It may be useful at this point to define and distinguish some terms. To begin with, let's define consent1 as formal, explicit consent. This is the consent that is given when I say (or say something which amounts to saying) "I consent", and withheld when I do not say this. Consent1 has the following significant properties:

It has a binary semantics: consent is either given or withheld. Giving my consent has a consent-value of true; withholding it has a consent-value of false.

Explicit refusal of consent and non-explicit withholding of consent are equivalent: not saying "I consent" has the same consent-value as saying "I do not consent".

It is bounded: when I say "I consent to X", I do not also consent to Y, unless Y falls within my understanding of X. Saying "I consent to X" gives the consent-value of true to X. The statement "I consent to X, but not to Y" gives the same consent-value to X (true)and Y (false) as "I consent to X", for all Y that do not fall within my understanding of X.

It is contractual: I (as a party to a contract) give my consent to some agent external to myself, to act in a way that affects me or my interests - my body, my property, my reputation and so on. If I give my consent to A, this does not mean that I also give my consent to B, unless B's agency is understood to be a subsidiary of A's.

It is revocable: at any time I can say "I no longer consent". This does not mean "I did not consent", with respect to past actions, but it does mean "I do not consent" with respect to future actions.

Consenting1 is the speech act through which I give consent1. It is subject to the usual vagaries of speech acts - it might misfire in various ways. As a consenting1 adult, I am held to be responsible for my consent and non-consent: my word is my bond, and it is not ordinarily permissible for me to say "I said that I consented, but I didn't mean it". The consenting1 speech act presupposes a competent, reliable speaker; thus (for example), I can't consent (or my consenting misfires) if I am cognitively impaired, e.g. by alcohol or psychotic delusions. The distinction between a person deemed capable of consenting1 and a person deemed incapable (e.g. a child) is thus highly significant in terms of moral standing: to be stripped of this capacity is to be diminished, "infantilised", excluded from the game of "consenting1 adults".

Another way in which consenting1 can misfire is if the speaker is not speaking freely - if they are coerced or threatened. The moral standing of the speaker - their presumed capacity to consent in general - is not affected by this circumstance: it is not infantilising to say of someone that their consent is invalid because it was given under duress.

Standing behind consent1, and consenting1 speech acts, there is assumed to be a speaker in good standing, someone who may be taken to be speaking freely and competently, and to be a reliable and accountable contractual partner. A wide range of values having to do with "moral personhood" are concentrated around this model speaker, and in a world in which some people are credited as full moral persons, those who are not similarly credited are at a severe disadvantage. In particular, the feminist politics oriented towards establishing a "consent culture" are concerned with upholding the full moral personhood of women, in opposition to cultural and legal attitudes that treat women as persons of lesser moral standing whose consent or non-consent doesn't carry the weight it should, because their competence and reliability are not fully accredited.

Moral standing is a social-relational attribute, having to do with patterns of recognition and expectation amongst people participating, or excluded from participation, in the game of consenting adults; but the politics of consent1 often interiorise this attribute, making it an intrinsic property of individuals: my competence as a speaker is claimed as the public correlate of my mental competence, and the transparency and accountability of my dealings with others is converted into an assumption of volitional and emotional clarity. Similarly, the question of whether I am speaking freely is converted into the question of whether I "feel" coerced: public and social forms of constraint and duress are recognisable only insofar as I am aware of wishes that I have that I cannot cogently express. The assumption, then, is that inclusion in the game means being a certain sort of person, as only that sort of person can effectively participate in the game. But the problem with this is that literally no-one is actually "that sort of person": we are far more realistic psychologists when we consider the inner lives of those who are excluded from the game of consenting adults (children, for example).

To recap: we've considered two scenarios, the "vanilla" and the "responsible kinky", in which formal-contractual consent bears different kinds of significance. The first scenario splits into two: given conditions of near-enough equality, ordinary consideration of what each party wants and would like does most if not all of the work of making sure that people's wishes and boundaries are respected. (In the vanilla-with-equality scenario, people simply aren't interested in having experiences they or their partners won't like, so there is no need to establish a formal consensual framework within which forays into problematic experience can be undertaken). Under conditions of significant inequality, where there isn't parity of wants or desires or where one party has been pre-emptively co-opted as the enabler of the other's sexual agenda, the ability explicitly to withhold consent serves as a backstop against exploitation, but the problem of inequality (which is structural/relational) is not one to which consent (which is contractual/individual) can serve as a solution. "Liberal" and "radical" feminists have been pulling at opposite ends of this rope for literally decades now (except that it isn't one rope, and they're actually speaking different languages).

In the second scenario, consent has the status of a fully conscious, incorrigibly valid decision about what will be allowed to happen to me: I choose to submit, to be a "slave"; obviously as a slave I have, by definition, no such choice; so there is a discrepancy between the person who wills the consequences of my choice and the person who undergoes them. One of the outputs of this "splitting" is abjection, helpless surrender to overwhelming, depersonalising experience. The other output, however, is an exceptionally purified projection of abstract sovereignty. I may wish to be pitched into disorientating sensory overload, but there is no question that I know that this is what I want.

The third scenario I want to consider is that in which I neither fully know what I want, nor am fully able to decide whether or not I want to know: when I skirt or solicit an experience that also repels or frightens me, and when I experience my fear and repulsion as both intensely problematic and problematically intense. If my desire is for this intensity, and if what I desire is also unbearable, then I am in a kind of fix that the "vanilla" scenario doesn't admit, and the "kinky" scenario has already settled through recourse to a contractual protocol. It's not altogether safe, or sane; my ambivalence isn't ready to be resolved by the kind of information - knowing that it will be OK, or knowing that it will not be OK - that could be the basis of an "informed" decision. My boundaries are in flux; I am possibly rather aggravating or unsettling to be around; there is a risk that I may panic or flip out, but also the possibility that by persisting in my uncertainty I may learn something about myself.

This may sound like "what it is like" to have a personality disorder; but it's also what it is like for many people to be an adolescent, or anyone who needs to live through uncertainty in order to get away from already failed and unlivable certainties. The problem here is that my moral standing, the contractual and cognitive reliability that underpins my "full consent", is compromised by my inability / refusal to know and say exactly what I want; and this problem is immediately a problem for others when, instead of keeping a safe distance from the source of my ambivalence, I'm actively - perhaps even obsessively - drawn towards it.

I think that Halley wants to make a case for this sort of state of being as one whose ambivalences should not be resolved through the blunt decisional violence of legal rulings, or of certain kinds of axiom-mongering. Neither of these approaches has sufficient tact to deal with the kinds of pleasure and danger that the desire for problematic intensity can get you into. Against the claim of some feminists that it is infantilising to suggest that one's positive consent should not always be treated as decisive, authoritative and reliable, I would argue that undecidedness, uncertainty and unreliability are sometimes, and for some people recurringly, part of what it is to be an adult.

Suppose the existence of three distinct types of relationship towards the sexually "problematic". The first is that of people who find themselves broadly uninterested in, or even strongly averse to, the problematic: those who in their erotic lives are not ordinarily attracted by the tension between wanting and not-wanting certain sorts of limit experience. Someone who feels this way (or, at least, doesn't feel that way) about sexual stimulation will not necessarily have the same sort of aversion to aesthetic or intellectual ambivalence (Halley's "erotics of thought", for example). They will however prefer sex to be about first-order gratification (you please me, I please you), rather than second-order experience-of-experience (we are co-conspirators in the construction of a drama of pain and humiliation, say, or of some other means of inducing depersonalisation in order to unleash various psycho-somatic intensities). Following convention, let's call this the "vanilla" attitude.

In "vanilla" sex, persons seek to please and to be pleased by other persons. To the extent that this goal is shared, and the pleasure of the other person is sought and recognised, explicit and contractual consent has relatively little work to do: respect for the other's personal autonomy, and empathetic concern for their gratification, are locally salient norms which carry much of the burden of establishing whether and when sex is desired, respectful, welcome and so on.  Indeed, the necessity of establishing consent through strict contractual formulae may be taken as a sign that something has gone wrong: that one party cannot be relied upon to be properly respectful of the personhood of the other, is selfishly preoccupied with their own pleasure, regards the other as merely an instrument or occasion of self-gratification, and so on. Explicit consent has a primarily defensive role to play in this setting: it serves as a protective warding against failures of tact, or as a bulwark against exploitation and coercion.

If we accept the radical feminist argument that male domination and "male right" fundamentally damage the equality that these norms presuppose, to the point of rendering it inaccessible, then the establishment of something like a "consent culture" may seem like a plausible way of managing the harms of a fallen world. But the radical feminists were never particularly convinced by consent either, and with good reason: the person to whom it falls to grant or withhold consent is already on the back foot, already confronted with a hostile and self-serving sexual agenda, and already conscripted into the service of that agenda by the processes of gendered subjectivation that call forth the "male" and "female" persons who will perform their allotted contractual roles in agreeing to (straight, vanilla) sex as a consensual act. Consent, on this reading, is not a manifestation of equality - who typically consents, and to whom? - but a way of bartering with oppression. Under conditions of greater equality, it would become less rather than more significant.

The picture becomes more complicated if we introduce the second type of relationship towards the sexually problematic: that of the responsible kinkster, the practitioner of "safe, sane and consensual" sexual violence. By "violence" here I mean whatever type of forceful physical or emotional intervention is employed to bring about depersonalisation: to break someone up, push them over the edge, pitch them into extremes of panic, shame, rage or sensory overstimulation. It is crucially important that this violence - which is certainly a kind of "violence against the person" - nevertheless be qualified as consensual, and that this consent itself be qualified as "informed", the decision of a sound mind. The person who chooses depersonalisation must remain nominally inviolate, even as they script their own purposefully enacted violation. There is in this scenario a narrative of simultaneous debasement and elevation at work: the person who "surrenders" their personhood in order to revel in abjection, is at the same time affirming their rational individuality, their very public and politic participation in a strongly normed community of impeccably scrupulous perverts. Consent, here, is the focus of an intensely invested-in metaphysics of the self, a vision of agency which far exceeds the liberal focus on the individual-capable-of-freely-entering-into-contracts: it is rather an alchemical property, capable of transforming the base elements of embodied selfhood into the precious metal of all-transcending sovereignty.

This is, for all the wild intensities admitted within the confines of the sadomasochistic "scene", an oddly deproblematising schema. It is also profoundly and passionately resistant towards the radical feminist critique of consent, in which a norm of equality and mutual respect is first posited and then asserted to have been obviated by patriarchal domination. In the kinky version, the norms of equality and mutual respect are entirely banished from the content of the sexual scene, which is a place for fantasies of subjugation and humiliation; but consent is something that happens outside of this scene, enabling and enframing it, and is accordingly preserved from the blemish of power. That is, inasmuch as sex is targetted by radical feminist critique as a vector of gender inequality and its attendant harms, the sadomasochistic defence is effectively to separate the self that experiences the pleasures and dangers of sex from the self that decides on what experiences this first self is going to enjoy or endure. This second self thereby obtains a kind of immunity from the political jeopardy that radical feminism located in sexual abjection, but at the price of becoming radically dissociated from its own embodied condition.

There is a line of thinking in Split Decisions that, if you squint at it, looks a lot like rape apologism; and Halley is perhaps purposefully negligent in disregarding the perspective from which this similarity is glaringly obvious in favour of a perspective from which one has to do more work in order to establish that it is there, and may in the process come to see that it is not all that there is. Whether this neglect of the obvious should be seen as daring or irresponsible is difficult to judge; it took me a while to get past seeing Halley as simply being wilfully morally obtuse, and for perhaps sinister reasons.

During her discussion of the Oncale case, which concerned the sexual assault of a man by his male co-workers on an oil rig, Halley introduces a term, "problematicness panic", which is intended to work as a kind of analogue of "homosexual panic". The legal/cultural narrative around "homosexual panic" has it that a person with unacknowledged homosexual desires may seek out sexual contact with a person of the same sex, freak out when confronted with the reality of their desire, react violently (and perhaps homicidally) to their feelings of panic and disorientation, and subsequently disavow their own libidinal interests, projecting them onto the other person: this homosexual other made sexual advances towards me; I was frightened and disgusted; I attacked them in self-defence. There is a complex legal and political history attached to this narrative, which I won't attempt to untangle here - Eve Sedgwick's discussion of the matter in The Epistemology of the Closet is perhaps a good place to start.

"Problematicness panic" is then a sort of clone of "homosexual panic", in which the same-sex element is de-emphasised and the element of uncertainty about what one wants and whether or not one wants it is brought to the foreground. One may wish to experience one's desire as problematic, to get perhaps uncomfortably (but also perhaps delightfully) up-close to the undecidable elements within it, so that "wanting" and "not wanting", attraction and repulsion, are brought into intense confrontation. Eroticised ambivalence is the name of this game; although note that it is already ambivalence towards an erotic (or counter-erotic) stimulus or scenario. That is, first-order experience is erotically subordinated to second-order experience-of-experience; although the latter may for some people be where the action really is when it comes to sexual (and/or aesthetic, and/or intellectual...) excitement or fascination.

Not everybody is able to accommodate the rather hectic demands eroticised ambivalence may make on one's identity commitments and/or tolerance for sensory disorientation. To seek out what may very well be a dysphoric (first-order) experience, in the interests of (second-order) experiencing an intensity of ambivalence towards that experience, is to put into play a masochist dynamic that some people are better suited to than others - although a primary requirement of this dynamic is the ability to suspend the question of what suits one, in order to try on different costumes. The prima facie plausibility of "problematicness panic", then, derives from two commonplaces. The first is that ambivalence isn't always tolerable, and that human beings can often be observed in states of more or less violently intolerant reaction against it. The second is that some people, including (sometimes tragically) the same people who react violently against intolerable ambivalence, are nevertheless drawn to experiences that may test the limits of their toleration. We are thus primed to imagine someone in a state of confusion about what they want or don't want, wishing (without perhaps knowing it) to experience more of that confusion, acting in a way that gets them in over their heads and then violently lashing out.

The train-wreck (from the point of view of a perspective concerned with combatting rape-apologism) occurs when we apply this schema to cases of sexual assault. What will the apologist say about the assaulted person? That they wanted (perhaps ambivalently) the assault, experienced violent remorse or self-disgust after getting what they wanted, and retaliated with an accusation that their consent and person had been violated by a sexual predator. This is, in fact, pretty close to the line of speculation that Halley takes with respect to Oncale: she refuses to credit automatically Oncale's assertion (or, as she has it, "allegation") that he did not want to be assaulted, and invites the reader to consider the possibility that Oncale's speculation about his male assailants' possible homosexuality was in some way projective. I take it that Halley's point is not that this alternative reading of the legal record of events is more true, or more plausible, than the one Oncale (and his prosecuting lawyer) tried to establish, but that in a legal context one should take care to demonstrate that it is not true, rather than assuming (as she takes power/cultural feminism to do on axiomatic grounds) that it cannot be true. In particular, she is concerned to avoid granting legal authority to a normative assumption concerning eroticised ambivalence, namely that the subject of a dysphoric experience can always without further argument be assumed not to have wanted it and to have been traumatised (and legally victimised) by it.

Is feminism obliged to produce a global account of social reality? For Janet Halley, the possibility of entertaining such an obligation, and so working to reconcile feminist insights and truth claims with the insights and truth claims of other radical movements, should always be considered alongside a second possibility: that of allowing that there may be situations in which feminist analysis can only go so far. "Taking a break from feminism", in this context, means identifying boundary conditions, break points beyond which the feminist axiomatic (m / f, m > f, and "carrying a brief for" f) is no longer able to name and take hold of the kernel of the situation. A "split decision", indeed, is one in which the axiomatic-feminist response to some situation must coexist with a non-feminist (if not anti-feminist) response, one oriented by a different set of preoccupations and employing different analytic instruments. (The obvious example here is queer theory, whose history of differences with feminism Halley tracks through an avowedly tendentious and characteristically illuminating account).

For Halley, such moments of "splitting" are essential to her own erotics of thinking: the point at which narratives fail to converge, to intersect cleanly, is experienced as a kind of productive confusion, a moment of suspension and disorientation in which new ways of linking one narrative to another must be found. These moments Halley identifies as "postmodern" in their demand for an irregular, creative and perhaps logically precarious response. When a split decision arises, we enter the territory of what Lyotard calls "legitimation by paralogy", where the legitimating authority of existing narratives falters and we are obliged to entrust our thinking to the retroactive authority of logical inventions.

Halley further identifies a split within feminism between two moral tendencies, which she labels "convergentist" and "divergentist". The convergentist tendency holds the production of consensus to be a moral and political imperative: feminist theory must be successfully articulated with queer theory, with critical race theory, with disability theory (and so on) in order to give a full account of social reality, one that is capable of measuring up to the manifold character of oppression. The failure to produce such an articulation would cause feminism to default to being the "feminism of the oppressors": of bourgeois, white, straight, cissexual, able-bodied (and so on) women. The underlying anxiety here is perhaps that of failing to manifest an appropriate awareness, and of being ensnared by prejudicial assumptions of which one had remained unaware; "privilege theory" costumes this anxiety with an ensemble of standpoint epistemology and somewhat tortuous etiquette (the exhortation to "check your privilege" being an exemplary expression of the latter).

"Divergentism" is perhaps tricker to define, since it does not frame an antithetical moral imperative so much as simply suspend the convergentist imperative in the interests of inhabiting and exploring the spaces between discourses. Halley's polemical animus here is fairly clear: it's not so great to be "moralistic", worse still to be seized by "ressentiment", and self-evidently both more grown-up and more fun to be comfortable with dissensus and contradiction, to be at home (but never too comfortable) in the milieu of a partial, unsettled, positionally undecidable caesura of "awareness". There is a note in all this of an old, familiar, soi-disant "postmodernist" triumphalism, which found cause for celebration in the condition of dissensus diagnosed by Lyotard, and sought in the thematics of incommensurability and undecidability an alibi for relinquishing, in the name of a joyful Nietzschean dance of metaphors, all manner of onerous ethical and political commitments. Halley herself shows an alarming willingness to simply drop the "brief for f" and stick the boot in to opponents she sees as insufficiently liberated from moralism, gleefully stigmatizing one woman who has had the temerity to seek legal redress for her ex-husband's patently abusive behaviour as a "Valkyrie" intent on stamping his sexually deviant desires under the boot of state-backed, injury-centred moral authority.

The contemporary reactivation of identity politics is perhaps an indication that the postmodernists' triumphal parade has finally passed, and that "positionality", together with the identitarian narratives that assist in locating and articulating specific subject positions, is back on the agenda. The moral claims of "intersectionality" and "kyriarchy", two key terms which concern the commensurability of such narratives, are evidently convergentist in character: they simultaneously assert the intrinsically "interlocking" nature of oppressions, and the desirability of producing a faithfully "interlocked" theory with which to confront them. (That is, they suture an ontological claim, concerning the composition of social reality, to an epistemological claim concerning the best way to "map" or "reflect" this reality).

In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, Janet Halley extracts from feminism three axioms, which she labels m / f ("there are two genders", male and female), m > f (the male is placed in a position of dominance with respect to the female), and "carrying a brief for" the female (seeking to identify and redress the wrongs produced as a result of gender inequality). Halley's argument is that it is sometimes useful to suspend one or more of these axioms, in order to "see around corners" that the feminist axiomatic introduces into our view of the world.

For example, we may sometimes want to suspend, if only temporarily, our assumption that binary genderism is essential to the way gender is practised and experienced (even by those who refuse, or find it impossible to accomodate themselves within, a binary-gendered "world of men and women"). One argument for doing so would be that the experience and practise of gender dissenters already prefigures and realises - if only locally and precariously - a world that is not a "world of men and women". The global consistency of gender, its thoroughgoing structural power, meets its limit at the point where gender-alternative "spaces" are able to come into being. Thinking according to the feminist axiomatic will tend to frame such spaces as exceptional enclaves, endangered (and perhaps inevitably doomed) reservations of utopian possibility that remain ultimately subject to the heteronomy of the law of gender. The gamble Halley proposes is that thinking that suspends the feminist axiomatic might be better able to think in accord with the experience that such spaces embody and preserve, an experience of already-realised, this-worldly autonomy.

Feminists have understood that binary genderism is "the law", and framed their analysis accordingly; but this analysis may founder when it encounters the social fact of "outlaw" existence. There is sometimes a conflict between two antinomianisms, one apocalyptic (there will come a time when the entire system of gender will be overthrown) and the other insurgent (the law of gender is murderously oppressive, and in order to live at all it is necessary and possible to live outside this law). Apocalyptic antinomianism maintains a strategic "pessimism of the intellect", constantly spying-out the ruses and deceptions of the law (radical feminists have been prone to seeing trans activists, for example, as infiltrators or unwitting shock troops of a patriarchal backlash). Insurgent antonomianism embodies an "optimism of the will", a belief that meaningful autonomy is possible, that a good life can be lived in (and indeed explicitly against) a bad world.

A brief technical discussion is in order. We have here three related terms: a system of reflection, a term within the system which indicates the system's non-closure, and the Real (the excess of the domain over the system's power of reflection). Taking these in turn:

A "system of reflection" is a collection of terms, together with rules for their combination, which maps onto some domain: for example, a collection of primitive names, together with rules for generating compound names, which maps onto a universe of named things. The system "reflects" the domain, insofar as relations within the system (e.g. between two primitive names and the compound name that is formed out of them) correspond to relations within the domain (e.g. between two named things and a third that combines the properties of both). The system's "power of reflection" is the extent of its ability to reflect its domain faithfully: to name everything under the sun with Edenic innocence and authority, whilst at the same time seeking to "carve nature at the joints".

An exceptional term such as "the unnameable" does not reflect anything in the domain, but indicates that faithful reflection of the entire domain is impossible: the system's power of reflection is limited. One cannot exchange the world of words for the world of things, or vice versa: there is an excess on the side of the world of things. A "closed" reflective system is entirely adequate to the domain it reflects, always equal in power to the complexity of that domain. The exceptional term, to which nothing corresponds, is supernumerary, an "illogical" addition to the system which marks its non-closure.

The Real is identical to the domain itself, but in particular it is identified with the domain insofar as it does not fall under the system's power of reflection: the index of its "reality", its inconvertible separateness from the system, is this undominated excess. In another sense, the Real does not belong to the domain at all, precisely insofar as the latter is a domain (and hence the domain of some reflective system, reflected by and convertible with the terms of that system). We had better say that the domain belongs to the Real (as, in the last instance, does the reflective system - this is the lesson we take from Laruelle).

"The unnameable" certainly looks like a name, just as "the inexchangeable" looks like a symbolic token, ready for circulation. But just as the token can be circulated without the thing it betokens also being put into circulation, so the name can take its place (an exceptional place, to be sure) among the system of names without thereby becoming being the name of anything outside of that system.

"The unnameable" indicates a property of the system of names, namely the fact that not everything can be named, that the system's power of nomination is not adequate to the Real. "The inexchangeable" indicates a property of the system of values by means of which one thing can be made commensurable with another, namely that its power of evaluation is not adequate to the Real. In both cases, it is a question of non-closure, of the intrinsic limitation of some power of reflection.

The unnameable is then not some "thing", but rather "the Thing" in its unspecifiable Thing-ness, the Thing-ness that precedes any nominalist organisation of the world into a catalogue of nameable things. The Thing precedes language, and takes it by surprise. The inexchangeable is not that which adheres stubbornly to some inalienable use value, but that which takes no value: the point of the Real on which tokenisation founders.

What has philosophy to do with enjoyment? In The Caesura of Nihilism, Alain Badiou considers briefly the "anti-philosophical" charge that philosophy is committed to a wilful asceticism: that it does not wish to know (or wishes not to know) about enjoyment, somewhat in the manner of Auden's "Oxford Don" who declares that "I don't feel quite happy about pleasure". Enjoyment is "foreclosed", philosophically inadmissible, because of the "connection between enjoyment and the unnameable Thing, as unsymbolizable as it is despotic, which analytic orthodoxy assigns at its origin to the body of the mother".

The Oxford Don who is not quite happy about pleasure has made a distinction between two kinds of good: the happiness of a coherent intellectual construction, and the disruptive incursion of pleasure which steals away the felicity of well-ordered thought. Something like this split comes into play when the French jouissance, usually translated as "enjoyment", is brought to bear on the utilitarian projection of a "felicific calculus" according to which pleasures and pains might be weighed up against each other. If utility is finally to be measured in terms of organic pleasure and pain (as positive and negative valence respectively), then how is the utilitarian scheme to dispose of the disorganising force of jouissance, with the paradoxical intensity ("sweet anguish") that temporarily turns such valuations on their head?

One consequence of looking at pornography as the utilitarian deployment of sex is that its felicific largesse, its allegedly utopian freedom with pleasures, seems to depend on a foreclosure of jouissance. It isn't simply that the orgasms are all faked, but rather that nothing ever appears within the frame that the pornographic apparatus doesn't quite know what to do with: very little laughter, in the first place, which is odd when one considers the frequent absurdity of the set-up. The ideal felicity of pornography is accomplished through the ruthless excision of "misfires", caesuras, moments of ambiguity and confusion. In this, it is the equivalent of the meticulously storyboarded action movie, and its destiny is perhaps the same: the inevitable replacement of every element of the spectacle by computer-modelled simulacra.

Badiou regards "contemporary nihilism" as proposing two ways of dealing with jouissance: the "libertarian", which seeks a thoroughgoing "delinking" of enjoyment from any worldly bond, and the "liberal", which seeks to render enjoyment permanently available through the circuits of production and consumption. While the libertarian pursues a "drugged-up", "high as a kite" refinement of pleasure in which all relation to the world is suspended, the liberal, more modestly, wants pleasure to be available on tap; for it to be rendered affordable, accessible and disposable:

In its liberal version, the imperative is to purchase some enjoyment. This is what keeps the world turning today. The problem is that this imperative is empty, because enjoyment is, by definition, and by its connection to the unnameable Thing, what remains forever without an equivalent. It is radically impossible to purchase enjoyment; at most we can pay for the wrapper, as is shown by the principal model of this sort of commodified imposture, prostitution, and particularly the prostitution which, in our world, takes the prize over all others, the prostitution of transvestites. Understand by "wrapper", always isomorphic with the stockings and high-heeled shoes of transvestites, the endlessly replaceable surroundings of a failed attempt at enjoyment.

Badiou, "The Caesura of Nihilism", in The Adventure of French Philosophy, pp. 55-56

We do not think that Badiou is justified in considering the "stocking and high-heeled shoes of transvestites" to be more emblematic of the "commodified imposture" of prostitution than the stockings and high-heeled shoes of cissexual women employed in the same masquerade; but we agree that it is in any case an imposture, and for the same reason: "it is radically impossible to purchase" that which "remains forever without an equivalent", and no amount of desperate minstrelsy can render "the unnameable Thing" commensurable with the law of the market. But this does not seem to be any sort of obstacle, in practice, to the continuation of the imposture, or indeed to its extension beyond the boundaries of commerce into the farthest recesses of intimate life.

Following Frances Ferguson's characterisation of pornography as the utilitarian deployment of sex, we might say that utilitarianism establishes a grammar of action, a way of articulating bodies and of evaluating the resulting "statements". In Sade, for example, there is a drive to press on through all the available permutations of posture and gesture towards combinatorial exhaustion. The spirit of libertinage is one of dedication to pleasure, to the exclusion of all other claims; but it turns out that pleasure is a meticulous taskmaster, the engine of a felicific calculus that impels one to leave no stone unturned. If Sade urges the abandonment of all restraint, both moral and physical, it is in order that the space of hedonic possibilities outlined by this calculus should be explored to its furthest possible extent.

One could complain that this space is phallically configured, that its standard remains male sexual pleasure (and that conceived primarily in terms of ejaculation), and that the burden of physical destruction falls mainly upon the female victim rather than the male; but these flaws are in principle correctable, and the "Sadeian woman" need not be seen (pace Kappeler) as the willing dupe of a male system. It is possible, in other words, to imagine a perfectly "Sadeian" pornography in which the sole invariants to be maintained were a) the ruthless destruction of all values connected with the "natural", "moral" or "legal" person, insofar as these obstructed the body's availability for pleasure, and b) the unflinching exploration of the entire domain of pleasures generated by a utilitarian grammar of action. The post-human sexual utopia projected by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex is already quite close to this, both in the admirable iconoclasm it directs towards the (capitalist-patriarchal) human image and in Firestone's willingness (to the point of tentatively endorsing sexual relations between children and adults) to imagine an erotic community without conventional borders.