Perversion the Social Relation

24 Dennis Fosterlem of pleasure. The Aristotelian construct may stand like a fire wallbetween the subject and enjoyment, but the perverse subject can use itas a backdrop against which to stage a fantasy.Virus and VampireViruses and vampires exert a fascination in contemporary imaginationfor similar, but opposing reasons. Viruses, intruding invisibly on thelevel of DNA, remind us as their progeny emerge within our own cellsthat our bodies are not our own. 8 These secret guests arouse in us an abjectionthat holds the consumer's attention through popular magazines,books, television, and film, as demonstrated by the wealth of storiesabout ebola, a virus exotic in America, that liquefies the internal organsso that they pour out of any orifice. Viruses illuminate the silent interiorof the body, a flesh that is close, vital, and familiarly strange as only ourmothers' has been to us. The vampire's appeal, however, is sublime: fleshthat refutes time and mortality, that limits its knowledge of the body'sinterior to blood sucked from another as a baby sucks the breast, preservingbeauty, longing, and passion.At the heart of our interest in both viruses and vampires, however, isthe recognition that "life" does not favor the living organic body, butthe "undead" core of memory. Bodies live to reproduce DNA, which isitself non-organic and immortal and which would happily have us biteoff the heads of our mates during intercourse if that would favor successfulreproduction. Viruses are simple replicating nucleic acids, DNApackages that appropriate the liquid interior of cells for their own ends.In the virus we see the hopeless insufficiency of our bodily selves, oursubmission to an inhuman process even when that process is our ownDNA'S survival. The vampire, however, although it also appropriates ourliquid interior, represents a fantasy through which we can identify withthe inorganic force of replication. The appeal and the horror of bothare related to their disregard for the rational subject and its autonomy:something in you exceeds the limits of you, something you do not identifywith as you and which follows a path that is not yours. Burroughs'swell-established hatred of "control"—the insidious compulsions of sexand drugs as they are tied to corporate interests—finds its expression inthe ways the viral/vampiric human can be appropriated by social forcesand turned to other ends.