A psychoanalytic ethics of the pornographic aesthetic

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn his seminar on ethics, Lacan examines how certain forms of art reveal desire to us in ways that allow us to affirm and better handle it in our lives, and positions a psychoanalytic ethics in opposition to traditional ethics – what he describes as ‘the cleaning up of desire’, through ‘modesty’, and ‘temperateness’. This article asks: can this psychoanalytic ethics be applied to a pornographic aesthetic? Within the vast array of production and performance modalities that shape pornography in the digital era (including the digitized back catalogue), I argue something at once particular and universal in the pornographic aesthetic might be distinguished and articulated prior to any categorization of it being ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘better'. Where this aesthetic animates something of the Freudian revolution it may be thought of as an artefact of the libido – our partial drives and erotic life – in ways that differentiate it from other screen cultures. This aesthetic is ethical, I suggest, for refusing to substitute or displace its libidinal origins; here I draw on Barthes’ theory of the punctum to consider how the intractability of this aesthetic may ‘prick’ our symbolic identifications and ideals to generate a more honest engagement with the (libidinal) truth of our desire.