ANGE L AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 14 number 3 december 2009

We shall therefore star the text, separating,
in the manner of a minor earthquake, the
blocks of signification of which reading grasps
only the smooth surface . . .

Roland Barthes, S/Z, An Essay 13

Yes. Reading is a form of cutting too.

A

special form of masochism hinges on the
problem of a reflexive pronoun – in the

movement from I like to be hurt to I like to hurt
myself, lost is the logic of intersubjective desire
(the implied ‘‘by you’’ of masochism proper),
and gained is the signifier that represents me
to the statement (my own ‘‘myself’’). In this
movement, a supplement appears: the doubled I/
myself found only in the second instance.
Agent of desire in iteration one becomes agent
of desiring annihilation in iteration two, but,
significantly, what is effected in the second
sentence is a split – the gashing cut of the
diagonal slash that forever holds apart I/myself.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of the corpus gives
flesh to the latter utterance: ‘‘I am addressed to
my body from my body.’’

1

The relational and

gendered assumptions in traditional masochistic
pathologies (so important for all accounts of the
phenomenon, from Sigmund Freud and Richard
von Krafft-Ebing to Gilles Deleuze) are infinitely
troubled when the violence of the gesture occurs
on this primary solipsistic level. What is a
masochism, after all, that admits no other parties
to its pact because its first wound is to any
semblance of the non-otherness of myself?

This question ought rightly to seem as though

it cuts into the smooth surface of this paper, for it
is only through the ragged fissure left in the wake
of such a rend that any semblance of an argument
can emerge – the problem of the cut is that it
makes impossible the boundaries by which one

articulates the cut. Where, after all, is the wound?
In the bloody borders where it ceases to mean
or in the space left in its void, present only in
radical abstention? Where, precisely, as well,
is our definition of masochism? It is an identical
problem. The films I will examine hold open the
term as a problematic, filling it in (or refusing
to do so) as the subject of the work itself. To offer
definition is to give precise meaning and also
to precisely outline or delimit – a visual or
architectural problem – but also the word means
to have precision and clarity in a photographic or
other image, and that too will become important.
We approach the definition of masochism in
this last crucial instance: as a blockage to vision,
as fuzzy, unreadable, imprecise in its optical
signification.

eugenie brinkema

TO CUT, TO SPLIT, TO

TOUCH, TO EAT, AS OF

A BODY OR A TEXT

secretary and

dans ma peau

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/09/030131^15 ß 2009 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250903407658

131

In this essay, masochism remains a wound –

open, irresistible in its refusal to close. For taken
with any conceptual specificity – pathological,
theological, metaphorical – masochism is sutured
shut, the stitches tightly binding meaning to the
scar, but in the process filling in the wound,
insisting on nylon borders so carefully drawn and
woven. If it is an absorbable stitch – call it
history – so much the worse, for evidence of the
surgical touch will literally disappear into the
skin, erasing its own narrative of artificial suture.
Stitches bind the opposing sides of a wound to
prevent leaking blood, to hurry along the illusory
wholeness of the body – leaks, those slippery
vestiges of the originary trauma, are thusly closed
off. Perhaps this is the unconscious of injury, the
real of the lesion. We must hold masochism
stubbornly open – gaping in its lack of definition,
its refusal of the needle and thread – to admit its
own relation to the cut, the split, the very wound
it makes for theory as much as for bodies. For
even taken in its own paradoxical reduction –
pleasure in pain – such a formulation only serves
to make a wound where none previously was.
The term, after all, acquires meaning only by
emptying all its terms of it – pleasure cannot
mean what it means, pain cannot mean what it
means, for the term itself to mean. A split must
occur for such a definition of sense to take on
a definition of clarity. Such a split is possible only
by severing the subject of the e´nonciation from
the subject of the e´nonce´, as in Jacques Lacan’s
reading of the statement ‘‘I am lying,’’ in which
he argues that ‘‘despite its paradox, [the state-
ment] is perfectly valid. Indeed, the I of the
enunciation is not the same as the I of the
statement, that is to say, the shifter which,
in the statement, designates him.’’

2

This is the

very same split necessitated for the subject of
I like to hurt myself, such that myself and I do
not line up in the declaring, nor does the avowed
speaker map onto the avowed disintegrator of the
spoken utterance.

Lest you think this definitional and enuncia-

tive split is an aftershock or residual trace, it is
rather the essence of masochism (but an anti-
essentialist essence, a becoming-into). Thus, in
place of a definition that would bind too tightly
our slashed skin, we must hold the word itself

open as a field for the play of its meaningful
meaningless paradox. The word must remain
wound. Doubting Thomas insisted he must put
his fingers inside Christ’s wound to know the
resurrection was real; Christ’s invitation to touch
and believe produces a haptic truth, a penetrative
ethics. But the present project has far more
resonance with the anonymous sculpture Christ
Showing the Wound in his Side from the 1420s,
where the terracotta figure holds open his gash
with both his hands, and demonstrates and insists
on its deep openness. What is so striking about
this work is that Christ’s eyes do not defiantly
meet the spectator, nor do they entreat to the
world as the words do to Thomas: touch,
and believe. It is a stunningly indifferent Christ
who gazes down at where his fingers dig deeply
into his flesh, turning inwards at the very
moment his body offers its own mysteries
to rival those of heaven. What does he see,
head tilted to the right, eyelids drawn by the
gravity of the image, but a vision of his fingers
disappearing into the darkened maw of the newly
offered vacuole. There is a horrific claw-like
quality to his right hand, whose too-long fingers
weight into the wound and then fall in their
remainder against his hip with a cruel thick
bend at the wrist – the image is too heavy on that
side; these fingers pull open, they form the
wound as they verify it. This gesture has none of
the pedagogical significance of outward-facing
Christs – it is neither Gnostic nor put to the
services of realism; it admits of no other. It only
confesses the cut.

This paper will argue that a distinction

between the cut and the split has a crucial
significance for a reading of female masochism –
a distended term that as yet has no substance and
is itself a disruptive, open sore – not through a
process of reading (which is already on the side
of the cut), but through an encounter with two
films that stage this very division. That is,
the films under consideration here present the
problematic meeting of women and masochism as
a question of the phenomenon of cutting, in all its
various guises. Cutting predominantly appears,
however, in the movement away from it,
anamorphotically delimited in where it is not in
the films. In Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002),

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

132

it is the expelled piece of the female psychical
history, the pathologized bad object version of
redemptive

performed

sado-masochism.

In

numerous other films, it appears as the fetishized
iteration of masochistic desire – in Michael
Haneke’s La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher]
(2001), for example, it comprises the private
realm of a public identity and national history.
At the other line of the boundary, not yet sutured
or stitched closed, in Marina de Van’s Dans ma
peau [In My Skin] (2002), it is the traumatic
impulse that sets the scene for chaotic self-
annihilation, and it is in this film, in particular,
that the cut becomes the split, with radical
implications for both the cinematic subject and
the cinematic spectator, themselves forever rent
apart. The two films that will be examined
in depth in this paper – Secretary and Dans
ma peau – delimit the antipodality of the cut and
the split. Although they were released the same
year and are very similar in numerous and
surprising (or perhaps not so) ways, they are
eventually ripped asunder by the jagged edge of
this paper, in the form of its own theoretical
edging and cutting.

Secretary begins not with the body but with

the text (in the form of the textual machine), and
with the indeterminacy between the two. The
opening credits occur over the violent punctua-
tions of a typewriter abstracted in close-up. The
quickness of the machine-gun-like metal keys,
metal strikes, cut into the tape; the text does not
exist independently of the printed iteration and
registers before signification the strike of the
body. Cut to – and now more than ever the
significance of that cinematic gesture appears –
an image of a lithe professional woman walking
into an office bound in a neck brace apparatus
that links the arms in a sultry parody of a
crucifixion. Each task of the office (stapling some
papers, making some coffee) becomes pregnant
with the delicate bends and distentions of the
woman. When the film cuts to the title ‘‘6 months
earlier’’ and we see a frumpy stocking on an
unremarkable calf, generic expectations retro-
actively ensure that the ugly duckling transfor-
mation is a fait accompli. Secretary thus begins
by introducing Lee Holloway in a before-and-after
split that will eventually come full circle. ‘‘I got

out of the institution on the day of my sister’s
wedding,’’ her voiceover informs, and we come to
learn that Lee’s reaction to the strictures of
bourgeois family life (complete with a drunken,
abusive father) is to hurt herself – through knives,
other instruments of inscription, a hot kettle, etc.
Cutting itself is a supplement in Secretary, as it is
added to, not taken from, Mary Gaitskill’s short
story on which the remainder of the narrative
is ostensibly based.

3

Like all fantasy scenes, the

Gaitskill ‘‘Secretary’’ bears little on the filmic
instantiation, but instead comprises the most
formal proscenium around the characters in
which they are offered the opportunity to play-
act as they like.

Two models of writing are presented in

Secretary, two models of writing that insistently
return in Dans ma peau and are crucial for the
theorization of female masochism in this paper.
When Lee first exposes the mechanisms of her
scarification, she has just seen her father become
drunk at her sister’s wedding, the latter event
being at least as nausea-inducing as the more
obvious former. Upstairs in her unchanged
childhood bedroom, giddy in its rejection of
time’s forward progress, she pulls from under her
bed a decorated box, wrapped in heart-stamped
cloth – though the shape of the box clearly
inscribes it as such, it is even more so the hidden
under-the-bed location that marks this box as
Lee’s version of a secreted-away diary. Upon
opening the fetish treasure chest, she lays out its
members one by one: iodine, a razor, a series of
undifferentiated implements for cutting, digging,
scarring. She sharpens the leg of a ballerina
figurine and presses it deeply into her skin, and
though this time she does not puncture the
surface, there is little doubt that the white
imprint of point against plane is familiar and
signifies, even as it makes a mark too light to
read. (A small revenge, this little gap, this little
cut, a small revenge.) Her writing on the skin,
aligned with the private fantasy world of a young
girl’s diary, is counterpoised to the harsh metallic
insistence of the typewriter keys that Lee perfects
in community college, and which lead inevitably
to her meeting with Mr E. Edward Grey, a
meeting marked with the ineluctable contingency
of fairy tales and the overdetermined inevitability

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133

of their retroactive telling: Once upon a time,
I already knew the ending.

Answering an ad simply for ‘‘Secretary

Wanted’’ (the notice as pure Freudian drive),
Lee becomes acquainted with E. Edward, muted
sadist and successful lawyer. After their first
encounter, he sweeps a collection of red pens into
a drawer; they will reemerge only once the affair
requires their wounding foreplay. Cutting in this
film is first and foremost a hermeneutic knot
indicated in the gesture of editing, of piecing a
text into bits, each of which signals a desire
ignited and a punishment impending. Editing
is the preeminent form of the cut because it is a
process of simultaneous reading and (new, newly
changed, but perhaps in very small ways) writing;
like the annotation, like a criticism of bits and
pieces, editing stars, marks, even mars, the text.
For example:

I. Every

In logic, it would be the universal quantifier 8,

shorthand symbol for longhand meaning, inflect-
ing in a painful somersault its own difficult
negation: every, all, even none.

II. woman

The particular cuts in. Barred, blocked every,

the teasing dance of undoing meaning. She
cannot be all. Partial, she weaves the universal
out of the sentence, unmaking like Penelope
the very substance of her time. First: cut
the thread; next, unweave it according to the
pattern.

III. adores

Adorare: to address, salute, worship, orate in

praise of. Or- for mouth. For tongue, teeth, lips,
spit, words. Love begins with the mouth. To bite,
suck, lick, chew, whisper. As kissing the hand, as
of a sovereign.

IV. a

Little a returns – it can only return – as a

missing piece of the real. Fully detached, it
hovers in the smallness of its specificity. Every
woman does not adore every fascist. Shadow of
the every, the tiny detail is not all, existential
quantifier 9: some, one, at least one.

V. Fascist,

Blunt signifier, you are too obviously what

you are. A perverse inversion of Yahweh: you are
that you are. Failed sadist: you are that you fail
to be the law you enforce.

. . . and so forth.

The lawyer himself is the antithesis of the edit:

the extraneous extra ‘‘E’’ of his name, empty
signifier for his unnamable practices, indicates
where the cut failed to effect an absence, but
merely doubled its placement – Humbert
Humbert at least had the decency of repetition,
instead of the assumed blank forcing its comple-
tion on the other. With his red pen, later, Edward
finds errors; in the first case, the error is an extra
letter, like the very error of the editor’s name:
‘‘genderr’’ reads one memo, typed by Lee.
Edward’s red pen is Lee’s reddened knife – the
cutting of the skin and the cutting of the text are,
in this film, both substitutes for the heart of
the matter, the organ of theatricality in sado-
masochism proper. In other words, there are two
scenes of writing here, but both are themselves
failures, sublimations for the real work of sexual
performance. Insisting that Lee ‘‘look at it’’ –
a reverse injunction of her earlier typing teacher
never to look at the page as one types – Edward
verbally rips Lee to shreds. To which she
responds by cutting up her skirt, offering token
pieces of fabric in place of the wounded, parsed
memo. Edward finally confronts Lee about her
kit of Band-Aids, iodine, and razors; he insists
to her, like any analyst, that she must feel free to
tell him anything. Gazing intensely into her eyes,
he informs her that she will no longer do that
thing, that it is past – the imperative here
functioning as a form of writing a woman’s
history for her.

The letter returns – we know from Edgar

Allan Poe via Lacan that it always arrives at
its destination – in an order to Lee to ‘‘come
into my office and bring that letter,’’ which issues
forth the climactic scene. Edward commands
Lee to place the offending paper on his desk,
bend over, and read it aloud. Right after
this scene, crucially, Lee will throw away her
diary, her kit of tools, her signifying system of

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

134

adolescent skin-cuts. That renunciation is made
possible by the other scene of writing that will
come to dominate, the system of sexual promises
avowed on the mistakes of her typography, on the
mistakes of text and paper, second substitutions
for the skin. As Lee reads the typed letter – ‘‘I am
grateful to you for referring me . . .’’ – on the word
‘‘referring,’’ the first blow is struck. (This is true,
with this specificity of language, on ‘‘referring,’’
in the original Gaitskill story as well.) She stops,
and enters a long pause. Her reading continues
at his insistence, and again, at ‘‘referring,’’ the
second blow rings out, his hand fat and fast against
her ass. The significance of ‘‘referring’’ as the
locus of the initial strike is crucial, for this scene
functions as a relay, referring to past and future
points in the story, but itself functioning only
as a cipher. That is, any attempt to read this scene
misses precisely what metonymic displacement
is effected in the deferral and suspension of the
gesture. For this scene is about writing – a writing
on the body – a writing less about indexical
inscription, as with the writing in cuts, and more
about the writing of the typewriter’s indented
trace or residue of ink (this is the bruise). As
opposed to digging deeper for meaning, it is
relayed, or ‘‘referred,’’ to the surface through
broken vessels, meaning erupting from below to
hover purple under the surface of the unbroken
skin. When Edward is done spanking Lee,
she runs to the bathroom to look in the mirror
at her bruised and swollen side. Though it appears
as though what is written on her body is the
signifying order of the sadist’s desire, what returns
from the mirror is a map of Lee’s own erotics.
And come full circle – the referred past returns –
we now find ourselves in the film precisely
where we began, with Lee delicately ensconced
in shackles, playfully exemplifying what Susan
Cook calls the film’s ‘‘commercial S/M antics.’’

4

After some time, their performative affair

slows, and it is only resumed when Lee’s envelope
containing a dead worm arrives on Edward’s
desk, a punishment that is returned, perhaps,
only because its desire arrived finally in its
literal form: the blank, empty letter. The affair
culminates in what appears to be a mockery
of heterosexual union, an indication that the
other life for Lee, marriage to her high school

sweetheart, is not to be. As Lee insists to Edward
that she loves him and refuses to accept his order
that they stop seeing each other, she wears
the wedding dress intended for that other scene.
He orders her to sit at his desk, feet on the floor,
hands palms down, and wait. The resulting
ten minutes of the film are comical, to be sure,
as the media camp out to report on the strange
girl’s hunger strike and members of Lee’s family
and community attempt to talk her out of her
desire (from the supportive ‘‘There’s a long
history of this in Catholicism. You are part of
a great tradition’’ to the feminist-activist ‘‘Why
don’t you read about women’s struggle first?’’).
In the end, Edward returns to collect his urine-
soaked martyr and carries her upstairs to bathe
her and make love in what is no longer a parody
of, but is now a sentimental replacement for,
the wedding night.

Indeed, Secretary ends far less radically than

we might imagine or hope: Lee and Edward are
married, albeit with a honeymoon involving
ropes and bondage, and settle into naughty
suburbia in which they have each other and
have clearly not given up their kinky play.
In Frances Restuccia’s Lacanian reading of
the film, the contractless S/M relation gives
way to the formal binding of the marriage
contract in Lee’s transformation of ‘‘symptoms
into enjoyment’’; Restuccia allows that there is
‘‘a certain dopey, saccharine quality to the now
legalized S/M relationship.’’

5

What distresses,

perhaps, about Secretary is how very little Lee’s
ritualized masochism changes underlying struc-
tures that might be demanded by a, say, feminist
(as opposed to romantic comedy) generic frame-
work. Masochism is formulated to be yet another
lifestyle option along the classical liberal lines of
free choice, and one that is consistent, no less,
with heterosexual marriage, capitalist production,
and suburban location and cultural capital
benefits. Transgression is therefore mobilized
not to undermine norms but to proliferate
possibilities for a commodified identity. Linda
Singer’s analysis of ‘‘Sex and the Logic of Late
Capitalism’’ reads S/M in general as a category
of ‘‘specialized sexualities’’ made available by
the market to produce and sustain ‘‘a sense
of apparent freedom through the proliferation

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135

of a range of erotic options, styles, and scenes.’’

6

Secretary not only conforms to this logic but also
takes it to a comical extreme; as Restuccia notes,
‘‘Secretary is completely self-conscious about its
transmission of ‘illegal’ pain to legal play.’’ But
in order to effect this paradoxical shift whereby
the marginal becomes normalized, some piece
(of the real) has to drop away, and it is Lee’s
auto-inflicted wounds from the beginning of the
film that must be rigorously pathologized and
thus expelled in order to lend coherence and
credibility to the later performative acts. For as
humiliating and constricting as Lee and Edward’s
later trysts are, not one provokes the grimacing
horror of her skin, pierced and slit; they, indeed,
are subsumed under the totalizing twin logics
of performativity on the one hand, and hetero-
sexual sociality on the other. That is, it is obvious
that, for the film, cutting is the pathologized
element, not because it is ‘‘too real’’ compared
to the playful violence with Edward but because
it is done in isolation in, on, and for the self
alone, which is far more formally disruptive
to the public logics of labor and marital union.
Masochism, here, as a contractual, ritualized
sexualization of humiliation and bondage, is
thus acceptable and redeemed provided it is not
that other mode of writing, not that series of
indexical real cuts into the skin, not that model
of autonomous, private infliction of pain and thus
pleasure.

It is precisely to that realm that we turn in de

Van’s Dans ma peau, and with very different
results. From the title, we are given the personal
shifter ‘‘ma,’’ circulating its meaning in a
maelstrom of endless iterations of possible
referents, a cyclone of infinite possible subjects
to whom the title can never properly fix or bind,
but only mean relatively (through referral;
again that gesture). Refusing the ‘‘le’’ or ‘‘la’’
that normally attaches to speaking one’s body
in French, the insistent ‘‘ma’’ here both secures
the colloquial phrase of knowing the other’s
subjectivity (much as with the English equivalent
‘‘In my skin,’’ as in: ‘‘Imagine being in . . .’’), but
also effects one thing more: the mobile signifier
‘‘ma,’’ to which no specific subjectivity is
attached, ever threatens to devour the spectator
who approaches too close. For if one occupies this

place, if one takes up this ‘‘ma,’’ it is to
linguistically embody the place of annihilation
and self-cannibalism. In other words, to insist on
one’s place in the statement is to insist on one’s
erasure; to find oneself in discourse here is to
find oneself eaten and devoured in the very
same instant. The violence of this title is thus
principally effected on the spectator in earnest
search of a cinematic politics of identification.
There is no way in except through one’s maso-
chistic surrender to a troubled skin logic.

The credit sequence takes the proscenium

structure of the typewriter keys from Secretary
and places the trigger and the trace side by side
in a series of split screens, each of which appears
to show an image and its negative or X-ray. This
shift is indicative of the theoretical reorientation
that this film effects: from cut to split, from
depth model to simultaneity and co-presence.
But this appearance of doubling or inversion is a
crucial deception, for the images do not consis-
tently line up; often, only the tiniest detail awry
reveals that each image is not sign and converse,
positive and negative, but impossible, disjointed
and ultimately irreconcilable visual pieces that
never return to form a whole, that cannot make
up a unity or totality. The first words of the film
are telling, and again, we are back to the realm
of writing, which – let us say, with female
masochism, specifically – we never really left.
‘‘At three words an hour, you’ll never finish,
Esther,’’ the boyfriend says to our protagonist,
typing away at her computer. The doubled image
of her desk’s objects – scissors and pens – yet
again indicates the doubled possibilities for the
wound, the cut, the writing; it is, at this early
moment, the same doubled possibilities of
inscription as in Secretary. Scissors, pens.

The narrative of the film is quite simple,

really, with far fewer turns, digressions, and
complications than those required by the stric-
tures of romantic comedy in Shainberg’s work.
Esther, a reasonably ambitious professional
woman, is at a party with friends one night,
when, wandering through a darkened yard,
she falls on some metal objects and badly
wounds her calf. She does not, however, realize
the severity of this wound when it happens,
telling her friend she only fell and ripped her

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

136

pant leg. She dances, she walks upstairs; and only
in the cold white light of a white carpeted room
does she notice tracks of blood following her
every step like a broken shadow, a leaking
ghost. Lifting her pant leg, she discovers – in
the deferred temporality of trauma – the wound
with which she has been living for upwards of an
hour.

7

Stunned both by the gouging shock to the

flesh and the indifference which her mind had
previously shown to what now clearly hurts
terribly, Esther is changed. The men in her life
insist on producing their own epistemological
reading of her body, writing the traces of pain
back into Esther’s leg – ‘‘You must have
known!,’’ insists a doctor; ‘‘How could you not
have known?,’’ queries her boyfriend. This fully
phallicized logic reduces Esther’s wound to a
proof of her guilt, and suggests that a woman’s
own deception extends to the knowability of her
own felt pain. In an affective rebellion against
these certainties, Esther becomes mesmerized,
entranced, hypnotized by the problem of her
injury. Later, in a bathtub, she pulls at her skin,
stretching its thin translucence away from the
shell to which it usually stubbornly clings. One
morning, waking to an arm that has fallen
asleep, she pulls at it, the limb dripping and
unresponsive to her call for corporeal and psychic
attachment. Unwrapping her bandage, replete
with yellow, black, and crimson splatter art, we
see her grimace with pain, so the subject here
is not one of detachment and an inability to feel;
to be clear, this film does not offer the safe
referral of metaphoric work. This is a numbed
corpus – not soul.

Esther begins to cut herself. Inverting Lee’s

maturation and narrative progress in Secretary,
which requires repudiating the praxis of the cut,
Esther’s involves a determined adoption of it.
However, this word – and indeed, the concept of
the ‘‘cut’’ – is vastly insufficient for the project
she begins, and has only a passing resemblance
in its physicality to the more culturally specific
adolescent cutting we see in Secretary.

8

At work,

Esther takes off her pants in a back room, and her
oblong face suffering, eyes heavenwards like any
martyr, she grabs anything sharp and digs into
her skin, gouging, insistently clawing open
another wound. The wound is often explored,

furthered, deepened, by Esther’s soft but persis-
tent hand, digital forerunner to both the weapon
and the pen. So striking about skin in this film
is its phenomenal resilience, its resistance to
Esther’s implements and excavations, at the same
time as its fragile gauzy surface seems to finally
give way with relief. Blood runs sleekly down
Esther’s leg, but it would be as wrong to fully
attribute the imagery to menstrual anxiety as to
ignore it altogether, for it is a uniquely female
blood that runs and yet something else altogether.
When Esther tries to tell her girlfriend at work
that she cut herself in the storeroom, the
intrusion of the reflexive in ‘‘I cut myself ’’/
‘‘Je me . . .’’ offers an entirely different economy
of subjects and objects than the ‘‘I need you
to . . .’’ of Lee in Secretary. The radical split of
I/myself/Je/me is indescribable in a logic of the
outside; when Esther tries to speak to her
friend about cutting herself, the friend replies
with not a little disgust and confusion – Esther’s
pleasurable solipsism is, importantly, a logic
that admits no others and resists any public
declaration or recognition.

After the first incident of private pleasurable

gouging in the storeroom and the incredulity of
her uncomprehending friend, Esther tries to get
away from the awkward conversation with her
(now nauseated) interlocutor by saying ‘‘I may
have misused the word ‘alternatively’ in the first
part of my report this morning.’’ She quickly
leaves, making her excuses to go and edit that
paper, to effect cuts on her text. The verbal
punctum

‘‘alternatively’’

functions

here

as

‘‘referring’’ does in Secretary – the two words
are linchpins for both the connection between
writing and skin and for the correspondingly
different logics they effect. For if Secretary is still
firmly entrenched in the logic of the cut, it is
because of this ‘‘refer,’’ which indicates a double
fold of time and matter: ‘‘to bring back, reduce
again; to convey or give back, to restore, to trace
(back), assign, attribute, impute (something) to a
person or thing as the ultimate cause, origin
[ . . . ]; to bring into relation to a thing or
person.’’

9

The temporal logic of referring is

retrograde, repetition, iteration – a sequence
of cause and event, a highly modernist logic
of knowable attribution of both origin and

brinkema

137

movement’s progress. But more so, ‘‘referring’’
calls up an intersubjective relation – to bring into
relation to a thing or person – an economy that is
so crucial in Secretary for the narrative rejection
of solitary slicing for shared, coupled sado-
masochism. Compare this to Dans ma peau,
hinging on the problem of ‘‘alternatively,’’ which
means little more than ‘‘In an alternative manner,
in a way that offers a choice between two.’’

10

For that choice between two is not the comforting
bringing-into-relation above but a radical alterity
of choice to choice, a split that admits of no other
because both possibilities are other to themselves.
If ‘‘referring,’’ on which the first spank is struck
in Secretary, is the word that recruits Lee to
Edward’s desire and he to hers – that literally
refers them to each other – ‘‘alternatively’’ in
Dans ma peau is the possibility that Esther
may fall into the gap between radically irreconcil-
able options, may have to confront the doubled
logic of the split. We are left to wonder about
this misused ‘‘alternatively’’ in Esther’s report: is
it the false comfort of free will in the definition’s
call to ‘‘choice,’’ irrelevant to a woman in the
throes of a compulsion, or the unremarkable
binary that will come to be split into multiple
fragments by the end of the faltering film?

A promotion at work leads to new responsi-

bilities, including dining with clients. At the first
such event, Esther begins to hallucinate (though
the ontological status of her visions is indetermi-
nate) that her left hand is trying to place itself
alongside the meat on her plate. She pulls it away
and presses it back into place on the linen
tablecloth again and again. At a crucial moment,
her hand and wrist appear as a severed appendage
on the table, which she quickly removes to place
in her lap, social embarrassment masking any
sense of traumatic loss or separation. When she
finds her hand and wrist reattached suddenly, the
shock of that realization – grasping at her skin,
pulling on its taut connectives – is far greater
than when her limb went missing. She pokes at
the newly attached limb with a knife, hard. The
film at this point becomes a visual taxonomy of
things knives can do to skin, creating multiple
relations and forming new potentialities between
blade and plane: the knife tip is poked into the

flesh to lightly dent or deeply puncture; it pushes
skin around at variable speeds, slides into its
waves and folds, delimits, traces and frames its
tender surface; or maps a grid onto its sensorial
surface.

The film begins to literalize – to give (or loan)

flesh – to Nancy’s ‘‘Fifty-Eight Indices on the
Body,’’ which opens thus:

1. A body’s material. It’s dense. It’s impene-
trable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture
it, tear it.
2. A body’s material. It’s off to one side.
Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and
ends against another body. The void is itself a
subtle kind of body.
3. A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies,
pieces, organs, parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings,
tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full
of itself: that’s all it is.
4. A body’s long, large, high, and deep: all the
while being bigger or smaller. A body’s
extended. It touches other bodies on all
sides. A body’s corpulent, even when thin.
5. A body’s immaterial. It’s a drawing, a
contour, an idea.

11

In Corpus, a collection of recent writings on the

philosophical problem of ‘‘the body,’’ Nancy
figures the title problem as a plasticity expanding
(in) space. The body is a problem of spacing:
‘‘Two bodies can’t occupy the same place
simultaneously. Therefore you and I are not
simultaneously in the place where I write, where
you read, where I speak, where you listen.’’

12

Against Secretary’s rabid drive towards the two
(their binding, their contract, their relation, their
marriage), Dans ma peau seems to have listened
(albeit at a necessary distance) to Nancy: the non-
simultaneity of spatial presence of two bodies
is refigured as an absolute gap, an impassable
breach. Esther’s pursuit of the one (albeit the one
as an exteriority) returns to the originary spatial
displacement of her own body and admits of
no other. The renunciation of the other is
re-imagined as a renewed engagement with the
space that the limbs of the body take up, with
examining and preserving the skinned border
between interiority and exteriority, with trying
to touch the body because the body cannot touch

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

138

the other without displacement. But Esther’s fate
is also perhaps this allowance of Nancy’s: ‘‘The
only entry into the body, the only access regained
at each of its entries, is an access of madness.’’

13

For Esther’s project must end in a kind of radical
failure: to touch the skin is not to touch the self,
and yet this is the lure of the materiality of the
corpus.

14

Thus, the body is the site of extension into

and communion with the world but it is also
‘‘ob-jected,’’ against and outside the self, an
exteriority to the ego (‘‘Mais corpus n’est jamais
proprement moi’’). Referencing Hegel’s law that
‘‘the mind is a bone,’’ figuring skull as something
that ‘‘eludes the mind, resists it, counters it with
an impenetrable objection,’’ Nancy writes the self
as that which is by being withdrawn.

15

One never

knows the body as it is, perennial stranger,
despite only knowing others as bodies: ‘‘An other
is a body because only a body is an other.’’

16

The ob-jected, however, has a force; it touches,
it exudes. Nancy’s extraordinary conclusion to
this structure of alterity, that the body is the
Stranger, is that ‘‘it’s no wonder the body inspires
so much hatred.’’

17

What is materialized in

de Van’s film is the intensity and force of this
hatred of the (my own) body without the pat
disavowals of a pathologizing narrative.

As Esther touches her skin’s slices and

scratches – secreting away tastes of the blood
that is both interior and exterior to herself – she
begins to rip and dig into her flesh rabidly, biting
into her forearm greedily, as little girls might
practice giving themselves a hickey. Her compa-
nions blithely dine away, aware only of her
awkward silences in response to their polite,
inane questions. Esther leaves the client dinner
for the tawdry confines of a darkly lit hotel, thus
beginning the secret love affair with herself that
will dominate the remainder of the film and
replace the bourgeois marriage that concludes
Secretary. This erotic liaison necessitates all the
deceptions of any affair (skipping work to be with
her lover herself; lying to her boyfriend; staging
a car accident to justify both her wounds and her
late arrival home). In the room, alone, finally, she
chews on her hand, bites it, tastes the pull of the

skin away from itself. Recall that Lacan, speaking
of the fantasy of ‘‘being gobbled up,’’ teaches that

verging on all the resonances of masochism, is
the altrified term of the oral drive [ . . . ] Since
we refer to the infant and the breast, and since
sucking is sucking, let us say that the oral
drive is getting sucked, it is the vampire.

18

Taking a knife, Esther digs away chunks of flesh,
slices thin slivers, to chew and tear and consume
and savor. In a lover’s embrace, she eats pieces of
her skin, at one point cutting into her leg, lying
on her back, pulling her thigh in to her face, and
drinking her blood while tucked into both parts
of a vampiric Klimt kiss. Taking herself fully in,
licking and kissing and sucking her own wound,
both victim and demon to the love bites of the
Succubus – and her masochism beyond oral to
outright ingestive – she covers her face in her
blood, makes herself into the wound, makes
herself all wound.

Luce Irigaray’s famous model for an economy

of female desire is the haptic contiguity of
genitals ‘‘formed of two lips in continuous
contact. Thus, with herself, she is already two –
but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each
other.’’

19

But, if so, then what becomes of

woman’s writing, woman’s desire, when these
doubled (split) lips, indivisible, that refer only to
each other, become two lips eating each other?

20

Irigaray’s model holds out the promise of a
history of female desire in time, a permanence to
the caress that is continuous, with no origin and
no end. But Esther’s eroto-ethics of two lips
eating each other secures non-difference at the
expense of any grounding in time, as the very
caressing bite threatens to consume the marker of
contiguous desire. If a cut leaves a scar, this bite
eats that trace and thus consumes any possibility
of history or archeology. Dans ma peau out-
radicalizes Irigaray in this regard: a self-love
predicated

on

self-annihilation

refuses

any

remainder that might be taken up into a gendered
economy of desire, but exists for itself solely in
private, solipsistic extinction. As the kiss that
expires all breath – the cannibal kiss that eats the
other’s closeness and fatty flesh – female desire
here is both the consuming split of subjectivity,

brinkema

139

of a feminine difference irreducible to one-ness,
and a devouring autophagia that ingests and
overwhelms the very split that makes such
avariciousness for the otherness of the self
possible in the first place.

The crucial detail in the historical writing of

masochism (in its many guises, terms that are
themselves non-coincidental and fragmentary)
is an overproximation between women and the
phenomenon, a too-closeness that makes, even for
its first, early describers, feminine masochism
little more than an obvious and logical redun-
dancy. Freud explicitly exempts the category
from rigorous psychoanalytic study, writing in
‘‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’’ that
feminine masochism ‘‘is the one that is most
accessible to our observation and least problema-
tical, and it can be surveyed in all its relations.’’

21

Although both men and women can exhibit this
category of masochism, the fantasy scenarios
‘‘place the subject in a characteristically female
situation; they signify, that is, being castrated,
or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.’’

22

This case of masochism, for Freud, is based
on ‘‘primary, erotogenic masochism, on pleasure
in pain.’’

23

Although Freud is careful to insist

on the cultural factors that produce sexed bodies,
and although feminine masochism can be
assumed by both sexes, it is nevertheless the
performance’s association with femininity that so
problematically brings Womanness together with
an assumed innate masochistic tendency. Even
though writers after Freud attempted to compli-
cate the notion of feminine masochism, rarely
were they able to fully divorce Woman from an
assumed passivity or erotogenic relation. Helene
Deutsch, despite her nuances of the acculturated
ways in which it manifests in womanly behavior,
nevertheless makes recourse to ‘‘‘femininity,’ by
which I mean the feminine, passive-masochistic
disposition in the feminine life of women.’’

24

This definition of femininity can only end in

a tautology: it is that which is described as
femininity, true if and only if women are already
passive-masochistic. It is neither the language of
psychoanalysis nor the acculturated femininity
that is itself the problem here, but rather that the
over closeness (to the point of identification)
between women and masochism produces as

inevitable the telos of its efficient narrative –
that the female child requires far fewer maneuvers
to become the masochist in Freud’s ‘‘A Child is
Being Beaten.’’ Woman, having been over
identified with masochism, slides a bit too quickly,
rather too sleekly, over the middle steps that
produce pleasure in pain. Kaja Silverman reads
this formulation in Freud to suggest that female
masochism is in fact constitutive of heteronorma-
tivity; she writes that female masochism ‘‘always
implies desire for the father and identification
with the mother, a state of affairs that is normative
for the female subject, but ‘deviant’ for her male
counterpart.’’

25

Cultural symptom or anatomical

destiny, political metaphor or normative pawn,
woman is always a bit too close to her eventual
dissolution. De Van’s film, however, begins to
make rough and jagged this sleek progress;
in fidelity to that film’s concerns, we might say
that de Van scarifies the pristine skin of feminine
masochism, roughs it up, intrudes with violence
upon its glossy naturalism. In taking to its logical
extreme the theoretical supposition that the body
of woman is over close to masochism, Dans ma
peau makes feminine masochism strange to itself
once again. This making-strange is not, however,
the fulfillment of the Russian Formalist injunc-
tion; it is literally making masochism strange
by making it the stranger that is both of the self
and alterior to the self. That is, de Van gives
masochism back the body and gives that body as
the strange; while it may seem as though the
body never left this discussion, the endless
deferrals of performativity were predicated on
a disavowal of the scarified, wounded, penetrable
and anguishing corpus. Elided in theoretical
treatments of all manners of contract, discourse,
and play are a body that may be touched, may be
hurt, may be eaten. A self-negating erotic
masochism is made present here, but paradoxi-
cally it is given presence through pursuing the
violent eliminations of the flesh. The film renders
masochism radically other by bringing it, pre-
cisely, closer than too close, placing it inside of
touch. Dans ma peau consumes its overproxima-
tion; Esther eats not only her chewy bits of skin
but also her feminine masochistic supposition.
We might say that beyond critique there is only
ingestion.

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

140

Entering a station lit by washed-out fluores-

cent un-light, time and the image start to bend
and sway for Esther, a brightness that is too much
too unreal, a slowness and fastness that pull time
away from her psyche as skin away from bone.
The body-out-of-joint character of Esther at the
end of the film becomes a time-out-of-joint
character of the world. In a store, the frame
splits, and we are now fully out of the realm
of the cut. Bags, clothes, indifferent objects of
purchase appear with no logic of placement or
purpose: at times, on the left side of the screen,
we think we detect a series of objects, while
gestures and human activities seem to appear on
the right – but this pattern also eventually fails.
This is not the first time we have seen the split
screen – as I wrote above, the film credits occur
over a split that teases with the possibility of
unification from fragmentation: the images
appear to be negative images of each other, but
a small, crucial detail, an almost imperceptible
difference, marks the images as other to the
other, as non-complementary pieces. In the split
screen towards the end of the film we begin to
note such differences: bags on the left; clothes on
the right; knife on the left; camera on the right.
But such a binary ordering cannot hold, for that
camera appears on both sides of the screen; thus
difference intrudes without order or hierarchy.
A black screen; the sound of a camera shutter;
bloody sheets back in the hotel take up both sides
of the broken image. Objects cluttering the space
of the frame – a can of soda, a blade – have no
discernable relation to each other: the connection
between the split frames is not a pure doubling
(it is not that model of symmetrical excess), not a
binary opposition (neither montage nor dialecti-
cal), not a fantasmatic other scene – and two eyes
do not make up a self – for the images are simply
too close with a too close difference. They are
simply a bit off (a bit off, also pieces bitten off)
from each other, exhibiting only a sliver of space
difference in proportion, height, composition,
relation. They are split with no possibility of a
complementary relation to which either part
might ever refer – they are in a relation of the
alternatively, a relation of the supplement.

The cut and the split – neither should be

reduced to the wounds they variously make.

Cut, an assortment (there are too many; cuts
must be made): ‘‘lot, fate, fortune’’; ‘‘a stroke
or blow with a sharp-edged instrument’’; ‘‘inten-
tional absence from or deliberate omission to
attend (an event)’’; ‘‘Cinemat. A quick transition
from one shot to the next’’; ‘‘To penetrate with an
edged instrument which severs the continuity
of the substance.’’

26

Split, assorting again:

‘‘A rupture, breach, division, or dissension in a
party or sect, or between friends’’; ‘‘Of violent
grief or pain’’; ‘‘Of loud noise’’; ‘‘To divide
or separate by the interposition of something’’;
‘‘to quarrel, to part company’’; ‘‘With reference
to division or disassociation affecting a person’s
mental life or the self.’’

27

Psychoanalysis makes

this distinction as well: objet a, missing piece,
pound of flesh, token of the real cut away from
the self; and the divided self, split into speaker
and spoken, writer and written. When the cut is
not enough, when it cannot go any deeper, the
only recourse is to the radical finitude of the split.

What becomes visible in the split screen that

comprises the latter part of Dans ma peau is the
very form of the split – the irreducible marker
that splitness leaves in its gestural wake: a tear
that is both absence and surplus, a voided
remainder that does not allow for any retroactive
unity and cannot reassemble into wholeness.
What we see is precisely what does not line up,
what does not permit a wholeness to the screen:
in the impossible relation, we glimpse what is not
there because it cannot be there for the split to
effect its workings. Seeing the split is not to see
into bounded darkness, not to locate an inter-
minable depth (that is to see into the cut, into the
damp recesses of the wound), but to see the space
between the irreducibly different pieces, a space
without place, a space without depth, a pure
marker of impossible difference that avows for
the impossible non-coincidence of the image with
itself. This, again, is why definition is already
a problem, for to ascribe boundaries of mean-
ing or an optical precision to any language is to
admit the possibility for a clarity that the
split functionally denies. The impossible non-
coincidental has no definition, quite literally –
optical blur is its sign of existence. This is not
the anamorphotic stain, the milky spot of death’s
head in Hans Holbein’s Lacanian frame, which

brinkema

141

still holds out the promise that if one moves
to the right, a bit more, a bit more, some
semblance of meaning may appear. What returns
in the form of the split is a non-space of meaning,
a non-sense of the image, a radical otherness that
offers no promise but sucks into its blackened slit
the accreted energy of the black hole: the image
on its border is a frozen burn of your slowing
non-reach to the horizon.

A whole image returns, collapsing into one

frame the whole body (though this too is a taunt,
for its wholeness has, by now in the film, been
radically compromised) only to cut the face into
pieces, prodding the knife into holes to supple-
ment the facial openings. Pulling away a long
piece of red skin, thinly sliced like film to be
developed, Esther preserves it, tans it into a
hardened fetish – it will be stored in her bra, flesh
returning to flesh, some skin to some skin. The
final sequence of Dans ma peau exhibits a tableau
of Esther lying on a bed, her face staring out into
a space beyond, into our invaded spectatorial
opening. This lying still on the bed goes on for
far too long; its overlong dimension allows only
the contemplation of what it is precisely we are
watching, of which we are entirely unsure: a dead
Esther, a contemplative Esther, a transcendent
Esther, a fully psychotic Esther, or not Esther at
all but a fantasmatic mirage mythologized against
the fake post-Lapsarian green of the hotel
wallpaper, which absorbs the gaze like gauze to
the wound, the gaze made fabric, for the flesh
of the look has gone missing.

Overwhelming in its duration, its saturated

color, its remarkable refusal to suture or
conclude, the ending insists on but one thing:
the materiality of the duration of the image.
Taking up the place of the gouged-out flesh,
filling out the non-space of the split is the
insistently felt time of thickened spectatorship.
This duration-vision grounds the radical instan-
tiation of a masochistic aesthetic offered by
Dans ma peau, for it produces the undefined
skin of temporality as a site for transcendent
dissolution into the space between the split.
To insist that masochistic spectatorship is
produced in this film because the images of
violence make it ‘‘hurt to look’’ entirely misses

the point – it is nothing that is or can be seen, but
the seductive unseen felt that is located in the
problem of the split. We cannot but stare at the
image, and in this look we feel fully its radical
insufficiency.

One

problem

with

cinematic

theories of masochistic spectatorship – from
Gaylyn Studlar and Silverman to Steven Shaviro
– is that they are predicated on a model of
spectatorial enjoyment through mastery and
control (even as they invert that model); thus, a
viewer practice based on relinquishing power and
its enjoyments is figured as masochistic.

28

(This

is one reason why theorists of horror films
regularly employ the theoretical language of
masochistic spectatorial practices to account for
the disturbing fascinations of that genre.) But in
place of the pleasures of possession and control
are the numerous other pleasures of self-
shattering jouissance; in Shaviro’s formulation,
‘‘the masochist seeks not to reach final con-
summation, but to hold it off, to prolong the
frenzy, for as long as possible,’’ to which he links
a call for a seductive cinematic aesthetic.

29

The

problem with this version of masochism is that it
falls prey to the pretty logic that subtends
Secretary: the ecstatic pleasures of unbounded-
ness bracket questions of pain and merely
document how spectators may enjoy the long
slow ride of prolonged cinematic tension. A new
tautology takes the place of masochism: pleasure
in (new, different) pleasure evades precisely the
problematic of the alterity of the body outlined in
Dans ma peau.

It is always impossible to see all – this, rather

than the impossibility of saying all, is how Lacan
ought to have begun Television – and the scrap
of vision offered here is the dimensionless line at
which pieces go missing. The force of this non-
image far exceeds that to which we are explicitly
exposed. Watching what we cannot have, we also
watch what we are given in the overpresence
of duration, and the double fold of this split –
between image and time, material and percep-
tion – is suspended, never to fully arrive, nor to
fully depart, but to freeze on its own dimension-
less border. Properly masochistic, Dans ma peau
holds open the question of what the wound means
as an impossible reunification, a split without an

to cut, to split, to touch, to eat

142

origin to which that split refers. Dans ma peau
is the failure of an empathetic engagement with
alterity; to be ‘‘in my skin’’ is not a translatable
experiential promise nor is it grounds for a politics
or ethics. To issue pain upon the self is neither
to know the self nor to bind the self to a pain-
bequeathing other; it is instead merely and only to
tarry with the skin. In other words, the aesthetic
offered here is grounded in the refusal of suture, the
rejection of stitches that bind and offer definition to
the bloodied opening of the text’s fleshy, secreted
meanings. The punishment never quite arrives, but
is delayed and absorbed by the temporality of the
film’s conclusion – where the image hurts, we do
not find masochism but only shock or surprise or
obscenity (and each of those commutable into a new
kind of pleasure). Instead, the possibilities for a
new flesh, a new writing, a new relation to the split
are located in the transcendent openness of the final
image. The dissolution and annihilation of Esther’s
self-consumption are but the promises delivered in
the absorbance of the gaze with which the film
allows an end. ‘‘The truth of a body,’’ Nancy writes,
‘‘appears in its dismembering, in its tearing apart,
when the blood bursts out of the skin: the skin,
instead of an envelope, becomes a surface to break.
The mutilated body reveals its interiority, its depth,
the secret of its life.’’

30

The truth of a textual body,

likewise, appears in its dismembering, in its tearing
apart in the form of the enigmatic sutureless split.
The skin of the film, instead of an envelope for
meaning and signification, becomes a formal
surface to rip and break. Mining the I no longer
involves unearthing depths of meaning but a
shallow purposeless rooting around in the murky
underside of the body’s borderlands. The mutilated
form reveals its interiority in the refusal to write
a new depth into the corpus that has been
consumed, but brings forth, instead, the intensity
of the materiality of the screen. In place of
resolution (contractual and normative, as in
Secretary, but also theoretical and spectatorial, as
in so much critique) there is only the open
excavation of corporeal and cine-
matic substance, a violent collu-
sion between skin and screen
enabled by mutilation and not
despite it.

notes

I would like to express my gratitude to the editors
and an anonymous reader for their incisive com-
ments on an earlier version of this paper

1 Nancy,‘‘Corpus’’ 19; emphasis in original.

2 Lacan 139.

3 Gaitskill 131^ 47.

4 Cook argues that, because of its pop cultural
references to self-help guides for the newly sub-
missive, ‘‘Secretary takes up the discourse of S/M
to the extent that it is a theatrical, self-conscious
parody of its own commercialism.’’ However, Cook
also notes that ‘‘The film’s transgressive S/M per-
formance is depicted as lighthearted fantasy.
Its darker elements ^ Lee’s self-mutilation, her
father’s alcoholism, her family’s domestic abuse ^
are somehow all resolved as her masochism finds
its satisfying complement in her new S/M relation-
ship.’’ Thus, the transgressive parodic dimensions
are supported ^ as, I argue, is the relationship
itself ^ only through the expulsion of the cutting
from the film (it is literally cut out). Cook 121^ 41.

5 Restuccia.

6 Singer 48.

7 The location of Esther’s original trauma is remi-
niscent of the cuts up the calf in Baburen’s painting
The Flaying of Marsyas (c.1623), which leads from leg
to genitals, eroticizing the painful ascent.

8 Esther’s ethical practice does not line up with
Slavoj Z›iz›ek’s reading of cutting as a defense
against virtuality and an attempt to reclaim a
connection to the real. He writes:

Recall the phenomenon of ‘‘cutters’’ (mostly
women who experience an irresistible urge
to cut themselves with razors or otherwise
hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the
virtualization of our environs: it stands for a
desperate strategy to return to the real of
the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted
with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the
body, which guarantee the subject’s inclusion
in the (virtual) symbolic order ^ with the cut-
ters, the problem is the opposite one,
namely the assertion of reality itself. Far
from being suicidal, far from signaling a
desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical

brinkema

143

attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality
[ . . . ] The standard report of cutters is that,
after seeing the red warm blood flowing out
of the self-inflicted wound, they feel alive
again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although
[ . . . ] cutting is a pathological phenomenon,
it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at
regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding
a total psychotic breakdown.

Z›iz›ek aims at but misses Esther, whose project is
not a defense against but a rabid pursuit of psy-
chosis through self-devouring (his account does
remind one of Lee). Rather than reclaiming a re-
lation to the real of the body, it is more an attempt
to rewrite what the real of the body is in the
first place. In this sense, Esther has much in
common with Antigone, the heroine of Lacanian
and neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis ^ marked in her
ethical success by her refusal to give up on her
desire, even as it leads to her inevitable death.
See Z›iz›ek.

9 ‘‘Refer, v.,’’ defs. 1a ^ 4a, Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd ed. (1989).

10 ‘‘Alternatively, adv.,’’ def. 1, Oxford English
Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).

11 Nancy,‘‘Fifty-Eight Indices on the Body’’ 150.

12 Nancy,‘‘Corpus’’ 57.

13 Ibid.

14 Nancy’s formulation is: ‘‘Feeling oneself touching
you (and not ‘oneself’) ^ or else, identically, feeling
oneself touching skin (and not ‘oneself’): the body is
always forcing this thought farther forward,
always too far’’ (ibid. 39; emphasis in original).

15 Ibid. 29.

16 Ibid. 31; emphasis in original.

17 Ibid. 9.

18 Lacan 195.

19 Irigaray 24.

20 Freud’s model of auto-eroticism as a single
mouth kissing itself loses some of the feminist
register of Irigaray’s model, but again, we ask:
what, then, of one mouth eating itself ?

21 Freud 276.

22 Ibid. 277.

23 Ibid.

24 Deutsch 412.

25 Silverman 190.

26 ‘‘Cut, sb.

1

,’’ def. 2; ‘‘Cut, sb.

2

,’’ defs. 2a, 12b, 15;

‘‘Cut, v.,’’ def. 1a, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.
(1989).

27 ‘‘Split, sb.

1

,’’ def. 3a; ‘‘Split, v.,’’ defs. 3a, 3b, 4d,

16b; ‘‘Split, ppl. a.,’’ 3c, Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd ed. (1989).

28 For the canon on masochistic film spectator-
ship, see Studlar; Silverman; Shaviro. Some impor-
tant work on horror films and pornography,
respectively, makes reference to this structure as
well; see Clover; Williams.

29 Shaviro 57.

30 Nancy, ‘‘Icon of Fury’’ 1^9. Originally published
as ‘‘Ico“ne de l’archarnement’’ in Trafic 39 (autumn
2001): 58 ^ 64. There are numerous possible
points of connection between de Van’s film and
Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day; for an excellent
reading of the latter, see Morrey 10 ^30.

bibliography

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Clover, Carol. Men,Women, and Chain Saws: Gender
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Cook, Susan E. ‘‘Subversion without Limits: From
Secretary’s Transgressive S/M to Exquisite Corpse’s
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Deutsch, Helene.‘‘Significance of Masochism in the
Mental Life of Women.’’ Essential Papers on
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Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘The Economic Problem of
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144

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reflections.htm4.

Eugenie Brinkema
Department of Modern Culture and Media
Brown University
155 George Street
Box 1957
Providence, RI 02912-1957
USA
E-mail: [e-mail]

brinkema

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