The obscene commands

We did not choose this body which burdens our subjectivity. From the beginning the body has been there, ever since our organism, caught in the meshes of language, became a body. Each orifice has a specific pulsion, a function. It’s “magic”, isn’t it? This is surely why everything concerning the body has generally pertained to the divine, or religious (inscription of birth, sex, marriage, death, etc.), and has often pushed Man to assume God in a human body.

And at the same time, Lacan tells us that this body doesn’t serve but for enjoyment. So this little piece of real, we are going to eroticize, dress, undress a bit, not too much…, following the grammar of each tradition, altering a body to make it desirable and also sacred. Even tattoos or scarifications attempt to border a particular jouissance, according to our prospective tribal belonging, according to our own state of unhappiness.

Nevertheless, by what Cartesian pretension do we dream of ourselves as owners of this body? Do we think we can choose? Do we think we can change body coordinates? With or without God, we participate in an emancipation of jouissance guided by the radical otherness of the real. If “free” we would be invited to do whatever we want with this randomly given body.

And what are the effects of this operation of desecration of the body? You see them everywhere! It’s no longer bodies but rather decor. An object like any other, removed from its axis of navigation (its relation to the Other and the others, which drove the obsessive nuts), the body now seems an untethered object. The object has become central, and what now commands is obscenity – in the strict sense of its etymology, what should not be on the stage, which is nevertheless front and center. The parents’ bedroom has become a showcase and our patients, increasingly young (8-year-old boys with their first iPhone), come for consultations because they devour pornography or images of dead bodies after a barbaric attack.

Where is Antigone to give sacred burial to our dead and restore our humanity?

Omar Guerrero

Translation : Lorena Strunk