Perversion the Social Relation

The Masochist Social Link 115"make it talk" by blowing through it and using it as a string.) This, then,would be one of the meanings of Lacan's la femme n'existe pas: there areno talking vaginas telling the truth directly, there is only the elusive lyinghysterical subject.However, does this mean that the concept of the talking vagina is auseless one, just a sexual-ideological fantasy? A closer reading of Diderotis necessary here: his thesis is not simply that woman has two souls,one—superficial, deceiving—expressing itself through her mouth, andthe other through her vagina. What speaks through woman's mouth isher soul, which tries desperately to dominate her bodily organs—and, asDiderot makes it clear, what speaks through her vagina is not the bodyas such, but precisely vagina as organ, as a subjectless partial object. Thespeaking vagina thus has to be inserted in the same series as the autonomizedhand in Fight Club and Me, Myself & Irene. It is in this sense that,in the case of the talking vagina, it is not the woman, the feminine subject,who convulsively tells the truth about herself—it is rather the truthitself that speaks when the vagina starts to talk. "It's me, the truth, thatspeaks here"—me and not I. What speaks through the vagina is drive,this subjectless moi.The ultimate perverse vision would have Been that the entire humanbody, including the head, is nothing but a combination of such partialorgans, where the head itself is reduced to just another partial organ ofjouissance, as in those unique Utopian moments of hard-core pornographywhen the very unity of the bodily self-experience is magically dissolved,so that the spectator perceives the bodies of the actors not asunified totalities, but as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate ofpartial objects—here a mouth, there a breast, over there the anus, closeto it the vaginal opening. The effect of close-up shots and of the strangelytwisted and contorted bodies of the actors is to deprive these bodies oftheir unity, somewhat like the body of a circus clown, which the clownhimself perceives as a composite of partial organs that he fails to coordinatecompletely, so that some parts of his body seem to lead their ownparticular lives (suffice it to recall the standard stage number in whichthe clown raises his hand, but the upper part of the hand doesn't obeyhis will and continues to dangle loosely). This change of the body into adesubjectivicized multitude of partial objects is accomplished when, forexample, a woman is in bed with two men and does fellatio on one of