Hi Alison,
Most everybody I know reads Dworkin as simplifying/simplified. I have a
different reading, which will probably make a chapter or two of a book some
day (next to a chapter on Ursula le Guin and another chapter on Bataille and
Kristeva - the general theme to be "sacrificial economy" - Dworkin's being,
or proposing itself as, the view from the slab...).
One thing, though: her writing is very much about complicity; for her, the
"female masochism" alleged by sexologists is complicity, and her most
persistent demand is that *this* "masochism" (which is perhaps not
sufficiently distinguished from other masochisms - a problem I'm still
scratching my head over) be unlearned - as in self-defence classes, where
the acting-out of violent scenarios is intended to train the body to respond
to aggression with assertion and violence (what I think of as the *good*
kind: "yaah, you bastard, you didn't expect *that*, did you?") rather than
cowering and self-abasement ("yeth, mathter..."). The latter is of course a
survival strategy, of considerable evolutionary pedigree, but it's not much
use as a survival strategy when the aggressor is in any case intent on
murder.
When I get caught by love, the symptoms are shaking and vomiting, an urgent
dispossession and rawness, but not - for me - the sensation of a blunt
instrument bludgeoning through an ice sculpture...
FLOS CAMPI
i)
Mine is an unquiet house.
By night the guests carouse,
sleep's plunderers, who reap
love's wayward crop.
So liberal the host
in furnishing their feast,
stripping the urgent stalk
of heady bulk,
by day the labourers,
old hands, go to rehearse
their pre-apportioned tasks
among the husks.
ii)
Eros, black-marketeer,
unquestionable shade,
patron of snagging briar
and ravaged bride
battens on our decline,
his humours duly drawn
from undissenting spleen,
relenting brawn;
his tenderness at odds
with our proportioned joys
displacing from their beds
the sleeping wise.
iii)
What words come to avail
themselves of our distress,
what arguments make trial
of that abyss
from which but echoes rise,
rebutting our complaints
with simulated cries,
familiar taunts?
Now let our thorough hands,
so schooled in sweet pursuit,
make summary amends
for our disquiet.
(1997)
- Dom
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