In the introductory pages of Lovemaps, sexologist John Money discusses what he perceives to be the flaw in liberal thinking about human sexual plurality: "the quandary of whether your sexual emancipation is gained at the cost of my sexual enslavement." "Sexual democracy," he points out, "is not synonymous with sexual licentiousness whereby anything goes, lust violence and lust murder included" (Money, 1986, p. 4).
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A glance at these definitions reveals a fundamental flaw in Money's
claim that they are "reciprocal conditions." The autassassinophiliac,
for Money, is more interested in his orgasm than in his death, resulting in a compulsion to "stage manage the possibility" rather than the actuality of his end at the hands of another person. The erotophonophiliac, on the other hand, is driven by the actualization of the other's death and--crucially--this other must be unaware of the killer's intentions. These definitions, then, effectively preclude reciprocity (See Nobus, 2003, May). The sexologist, it seems, is incapable of imagining mutuality in this context.
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We have seen that certain arguments, such as Robin West's, refute the validity of any claim of consent. Such arguments rely on an understanding that free will is never pure and untempered by social factors and conditioning. However, as Soble has pointed out, such thinking, if taken to its extremes, leads to an unhelpful moral repressivencss. Soble's point implies that at least a large degree of consent is philosophically possible and that relative, contingent circumstances determine the extent to which a given individual may choose freely. This principle must surely also be applicable to autassassinophilia. While it is highly probable that some people seeking such a sexual "kick" will display concurrent signs of mental disorder or dysphoria which, according to Soble's proposition, may invalidate their consent, we should nevertheless refrain from assuming that the very fact of wanting to be killed for pleasure is in and ofitselfa guarantee of the invalidity of consent.
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We have seen that it is sometimes acceptable to want to be killed (when a person is terminally ill) and even sometimes pardonable to want to kill (as an act of mercy or when sexual jealousy is tested beyond the limits of endurance). The problem comes when an act that we are taught to perceive as morally repugnant is not only motivated by, but also productive of, an excess of enjoyment. Our perception of the excessive violence (and excessive pleasurc?) involved in the act (the act's content) functions as a moral corrective to the liberal principle of respect for the structural validity of individual self-determinism.
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In his "Rethinking sadomasochism: Feminism, interpretation, and
simulation" Patrick D. Hopkins argues that what is eroticized in S&M is precisely the simulation of acts of domination in a consensual, exciting, sometimes loving space. In S&M the pain may be real, but the situation of slavery and domination is chosen and performed, often with many theatrical props and gestures (Hopkins, 1997). In autassassinophilia, one might argue, the death is real but the killing simulates, and signifies differently from, a murder (an unprovoked, unwanted attack leading to death).
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What is in fact at stake here is that the very terms of informed consent are incompatible with the model of excess and irrationality--the privileging of death principles over life principles--according to which uch a desirous configuration operates. Unab le to accord the ones choosing this act a legitimate political agency, the temptation is simply to cast the autassassinophiliac in the role of victim and the erotophonophiliac in the role of evil-doer.
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Freud writes: "one might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large
amount of activity" (Freud, 1933/1964, p. 115). The deceptive and subversive superiority offered by an apparently subordinate position has led theorists to offer a Hegelian interpretation of S&M as a sexual example of the recognition-seeking master/slave dialectic (see especially Benjamin, 1990).
To radicalize this position even further, we may remember Jean-Paul Sar tre's contention that all sexual relations are constructed as conflicts, in which each subject's truest desire is to gain recognition of his or her own freedom at the expense of the other's (Sartre, 1943/1957). Thus, degradation of the other is the aim of both partners, regardless of the position they are occupying physically and psychologically in a given dynamic. To quote Robert Solomon who neatly encapsulates Sartre's theory: "The central activity of sex [is] to convince the other that he/she is a slave, to persuade the other of one's own power, whether it be through the skills of sexual technique or through the passive demands of being sexually served"
(Solomon, 1997, p. 26).
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Following a Kantian model of ethics, according to which respecting other human beings means treating them as "ends in themselves" rather than as the means to achieve "my" pleasure, Nussbaum concludes that the most potentially offensive form of objectification is "instrumentality." This is because it "leaves the human being so denude of humanity ... that he or she seems ripe for.., the denial of subjectivity" (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 295).
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Muriel Spark uses the counter-intuitive chimerical couple: the active,
predatory autassassinophiliac and the solicitous erotophonophiliac, as a device with which to explore the deceptiveness of assumptions about agency and selfhood. With her central metaphor of the "driver's seat," she undermines the simplistic association of masochistic desire with a general condition of being weak, subordinated, and ineffectual.
Autassassinophilia as a model of desire is paradoxically full of being. The voice that demands the self's destruction--five times in five different languages in Spark's account--is a voice full of self, shoring up an individual assertion of being. This is the opposite of abjection, fragmentation. Who is sacrificed? Who is objectified? If objectification and self-sacrifice equal being an instrument of the other's pleasure, then it is the one who kills rather than the one who dies who is ultimately sacrificed, who becomes a mere extension of the knife or the rope that he wields. If we really have to objectethically to autassassinophilia, let us at least object to it as a solipsistic, selfish, anti-social desire, an example of reckless ontological brinkmanship, rather than as a straightforward example of necessarily diminished responsibility or of pathetic victimhood.