“Justine’s history of painful sex takes on much the same trajectory as Dorothy’s romantic one. ‘This memory [of sexual violence], with its ugly eroticism, was not in the least arousing; however she recognized something compelling in it, a compulsion akin to that of a starving lab animal which will keep pressing the button that once supplied it with food, even though the button now jolts its poor small body with increasing doses of electric shock’ (235-36). The story of the starving lab animal suggests the bare relevance of content to what drives a being toward what negates it: the unbearable experience of being stuck in a way of being in life in the face of unlimited need is also the experience of competence at a certain form of living. The ‘poor small body’ wants food, gets shocked, and is compelled to return to the place of pain by the possibility that shock will convert to food. Or, the small animal is compelled to return because returning is what it knows how to do. All the creature might know and know how to do is reduced to that one habit. The smarting beast is not using his smarts: knowledge is useless. It is compelled to create a form of living through repetitions that do not gratify it. But they do gratify it too, in the sense that this is a scene it recognizes. Recognizing oneself when one has survived shock provides a foundation for a mode of survival that is more than just a failure to die.”
prguitarman
pixelskylines
origamiaround
kianamaiart
dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
