실재를 향한 열정으로서 포르노

Pornography as the Passion for the Real

This paper is an attempt to define pornography in terms of decontextualization, which lies at the core of modernity. While sexuality in the premodern society was embedded in the social and cosmic whole, the modern sexuality was disembedded and isolated from such a context. Max Weber and Anthony Giddens defined modernity as an emergence of atomic individuals floating in the boundless ocean of freedom, without being anchored to traditional conventions or obligations. I argue in this paper that such an individualism free from social context gave rise to “the passion for the real,” which is the passion for the real sex in pornography; as sexuality is linked to pornography, modern subjectivity to atomic individuality. It goes without saying that pornography is a sexually explicit representation of the body as an object of desire, but what is in need of further explication is the nature of the sexualized body, for it is not the body as a whole, but the body fragmented into bits and pieces, resembling the status of the modern ego. Such desire for the real raises its head; since the body is represented as partial objects devoid of their bodily context, the real of the body should be restored, and as such the pornographic subject is on a journey looking for and delving into the real essence of sexuality. But such a goal cannot be attained and satisfaction is endlessly deferred. Here lies the dialectic of pornographic desire: the subject interprets the impossibility of the real as the occasion for one to continue further sexual journeys, replacing impossible satisfaction with delayed satisfaction. The pursuit becomes the very goal in a way that the desire for the real turns into a desire for the pornographic desire. Pornographic desire is the desire for unsatisfied sexuality, endlessly unachieved.