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Double Cain
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory
The only problem with this sociogenic myth, of course, is that in the regime of smell as well there was a libidinal "bond," a relation to the (animal) "other," but a bond that was impermanent, violent in its sexual imperiousness, ruled by a blind and olfactory convulsiveness that bonded me periodically only to "myself" in the mode of a lovelessly loving other. For who can this other be but myself, as soon as we grant that it's his smell that compels me to act out in blindness my own libidinal-instinctual nature? Drawn and bound to the animal other by the irresistible pungency of his odor, I'm pierced by that odor, compelled to share in the smell of the other and to take him breathlessly in. I frantically inhale his fatal emanations, and this inhalation infiltrates and convulses me from within, crumbling my being down to the core and commingling me with (the smell of) the other in a quivering mass of panting prehumanity. The bond of olfaction is an originary enslavement that unites me in a transient and loveless dissolution to an other whom I equally destroy with "my" smell. "Before" the regime of visual love, before even the cannibal's devouring and identificatory affections the smell of love bound "men" in a mutually interpenetrative and violent heap of animal-human being. Bound them, yes-but not civilly, not pacifically. This aromatic sexuality very precisely ruins the equation of love with pacific sociality by destroying subject and object in the very gesture of lovingly bonding them; far from fostering the unrelated self-enclosedness that Freud imagines he fears, it succors instead what we must insist is an excessive and passionate relation of non-relation: a (non-) bond of love with no one-no subjects-left to enjoy it; a narcissistic (un)bondedness in which "I" am "me" only to the extent that I now mime "myself" by obeying an olfactory instinctual injunction that comes to me implacably from the other. Man here "socializes" with his fellow man in a sightless and erotic mimetic compulsion that prevents him from freely socializing at all. And if, finally, we take seriously Freud's contention that "civilization is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of the individual" (49-50), we must grant as well that his fable imagines a contemporary reliving of this relation of nonrelation in the development of the individual psyche. Each one of us, on this reading, must pass through something like an archaic olfactory primacy-a "nasal" phase, so to speak-that predates both the ambivalence of oral identification and the pacific communality of visual object-love.
But where, exactly, are we to locate this utterly primal "phase"? Let us listen once more to the recounting of the myth: it is, Freud tells us, "anal eroticism" that "succumbs in the first instance to the `organic repression"' of smell (52n). When man stood up, he lost all (conscious) interest in the smell of the other's anus. But he also, unfortunately, lost a good deal of "interest" in sex itself, since it was not only his anal eroticism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements.... All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that "inter urinas et faeces nascimur [we are born between urine and faeces]." The genitals, too, give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man's erect gait against his earlier animal existence. (59-0n)
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