Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 33We should not be surprised that Burroughs's attention to divine vampireshas coincided with an explosion of popular interest in this figure,ranging from Anne Rice's soft-porn romances to Hollywood's productions.One big budget film, for example, seems to have been written bya Burroughs fan. Stargate explicitly links the Egyptian origins of monotheismto an intergalactic, time-traveling vampire who passes himself offas the One God to ensure a steady supply of victims. What is particularlysurprising is that the utterly blasphemous nature of this film wentunnoticed: its claim that the bloody God of Judeo-Christian religions ismerely a cover story for the vampire has, apparently, already been toofully accepted by popular culture to be worth mentioning. Burroughs,the pop icon, may be so readily accepted by youth because he comes outof the perverse yet familiar heart of the West.The sustaining delusion in the Western world is what Burroughs callsthe "fixed image," which he associates with the "basic mortality error"(158). This fixed image—God, Truth, the Phallus, or any other figurethatsays, like Parmenides, whatever is, is; whatever is not, is not—is behindthe monotheistic promise of the individual soul's survival. It suggestspermanence—even beyond death—when there is always change. Theerror allows us easily to link sexuality to reproduction: our longings forimmortality are so strong that we have no trouble taking sexual appetiteto imply a drive to make copies of ourselves, as if the vast liquidityof the bodily Real manifested an unchanging purpose. The romance ofthe fixed image is allied to perverse fixations, but it provides the perversethe guise of an economic, social, and spiritual good. Economically,this romance implies the reproduction of the means of production bymeans of an infinitely replicating ideology; biologically, the immortal extensionof oneself through children; spiritually, the immortality of one'sdouble, the soul. The fantasy of the fixed image denies temporality—atleast when time is conceived of as the wasting stream of entropie decay—bypositing a self not subject to degeneration. Burroughs's underminingof this "mortality error" also helps explain his attack on "sex"("Sex is the basis of fear, how we got caught in the first place and reducedto the almost hopeless human condition" [201]), as well as hisrejection of the female (The god Ka "is the only defender against thefemale goddesses of sexual destruction and orgasm death" [103]). Theseattacks represent his refusal of the tendencies to use sex and women