By Juliette Tang
I watched Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2004) for the first time tonight, initially out of boredom because it was on my “Watch Instantly” Netflix queue, and because I remembered, off-handedly, a remark the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek made about Breillat at an Authors@Google lecture that I happened to catch on YouTube last year, in which he discussed Violence, his latest book at the time.
The section of the lecture in which Zizek discussed Breillat was, more specifically, on the topic of censorship (at around 34 minutes into the video) and the ways in which censorship relates to what Zizek termed our “rules of discretion”. According to Zizek, what we term our “inner life” — i.e. our sense of personal narrative or interior gospel — is really just a “zero level ideology”, or the misinterpretation of our interiority (a mere discursive formation) as a kind of real, external reality (for those who are interested, Zizek delves into this in much more detail in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then As Farce). Amazingly, to illustrate his point, he chose the metaphor of pornography.
In order to operate in the ways that it intends, porn is absolutely obliged to participate in self-censorship of this “inner life,” or a censoring of any real or implied emotional discourse or narrative. Porn censors itself emotionally, or narratively so that it can be free to act explicitly, physically, in ways that narrative would hinder. A trade-off, in the crudest sense, of the emotional world for the sensual world.
As Zizek puts it, with hardcore porn, “You cannot have it both ways. You can see it all but the price you pay is to sabotage emotional involvement. In the sense of having an engaging story and so on so on… In gonzo sex you see a camera man, and the camera man tells to the actors, ‘move like that,’ and a woman who is being screwed slides to the camera and asks ‘am I ok like this’ and they make fun… I think this is the high point of censorship. They are afraid of even a minimum of narrative.”