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dissimile, in questo caso finalizzata all’emancipazione della condizione femminile attraverso il
piacere, è teorizzata da Angela Carter in The Sadeian Woman And the Ideology of Pornography 36
(1978), rilevando delle analogie con l’obiettivo della scrittura di Ballard. Da questo punto di vista
infatti la pornografia è ambivalente: strumento di sottomissione della donna secondo un’ottica di
potere maschilista e misogina, ma strumento di autodeterminazione della donna in funzione di una
sua ricollocazione nella società secondo un’ottica libertaria e non eterodiretta.
In The Pornographic Imagination (1969) Susan Sontag riprende la coppia oppositiva
Eros/Thanatos, per affermare che la gratificazione della morte supera quella dell’eros nella ricerca
dell’osceno 37 . In una nota a margine di “The Assassination Weapon” Ballard elogia questo saggio
dell’autrice americana, spingendosi fino a definire la pornografia la forma di narrativa più letteraria
e un potente catalizzatore del cambiamento della società 38 . Per quanto riguarda il rapporto tra
pornografia e fantascienza, nello stesso testo distingue tra il bieco fenomeno dello sfruttamento
commerciale del corpo femminile e le prospettive di liberazione di quello stesso corpo attraverso il
superamento dei meccanismi del potere maschile alla base dell’industria pornografica 39 . In
jouissance, a shattering enjoyment that is “beyond the pleasure principle”. Despite using Bataille’s work Lacan did not
make direct reference to it, and Bataille’s contribution to Lacan’s thought was erased. […] When Sade is rejected he is
immediately expelled but when he is appropriated he is first assimilated and then expelled, and the result is the same in
both cases. These processes treat Sade as a ‘foreign body’ which must be expelled to maintain purity. […] This process
has also happened to Bataille as well as many other ‘extreme’ or ‘transgressive’ writers and artists [cfr. W. Burroughs].
[…] The foreign body that cannot be dealt with is the one that still remains despite being expelled. Both Bataille and
Sade play the foreign body that exists on the limit, that cannot be safely contained within or held outside [corsivi
dell’autore].» Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, London, Pluto Press, 2000, pp. 2-4.
36 «Angela Carter sees the writing of Marquis de Sade as a reflection of social relations on patriarchy. She regards his
pornographic heroines Justine and Juliette as metaphors or archetypes – the “suffering woman” and the terrorist, both of
whom are perverse in that they are both conditioned by a social necessity. Sade puts pornography in the service of
women when he refuses to regard female sexuality purely in relation to its reproductive function, and proposes that it
can be fully employed as an instrument of power and an agent of female liberation.» Julia Šamarina, “Angela Carter on
the Ideology of Pornography: Rereading Marquis de Sade” (http://www.skk.uit.no/WW99/papers/Samarina_Julia.pdf)
[Ultima visita il 20/09/2010].
37 «Susan Sontag, drawing on Bataille’s account of pornography, suggests that it is “towards the gratifications of death,
succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends”, and Traven’s quest appears to seek just
this end-point. Here the obscene is reduced to an affectless geometric experimentation with bodily forms and sexual
postures that is stripped of emotional valence and physical or libidinal pleasure: “Soon the parallax would close,
establishing the equivalent geometry of the sexual act with the junctions of this wall and ceiling ([The Atrocity
Exhibition] p. 83).» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 77.
38 «In many ways pornography is the most literary form of fiction – a verbal text with the smallest attachment to
external reality, and with only its own resources to create a complex and exhilarating narrative. I commend Susan
Sontag’s brave 1969 essay (“The Pornographic Imagination”), though I would go much further in my claims.
Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided
with times of greatest economic and scientific advance.» J. G. Ballard, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, op. cit., p. 36.
39 «A marginal note in Atrocity praises Sontag's essay, The Pornographic Imagination, which wants to save a literary
pornography, where “inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain” against the “avalanche of pornographic
potboilers” [84]. The former is clearly coded as avant-garde; they are limit texts, beyond good and evil. Sontag has
constant recourse to science fiction in relation to pornography, surprisingly perhaps after the dismissal of science fiction
film in The Imagination of Disaster. “As literary forms”, Sontag suggests, “pornography and science fiction resemble
each other in several interesting ways” [84]. The de-legitimation of pornography as literature -- because it has an
uncomplex address, single intent, a ruthless functionalism with regard to language, and no interest in character --
meshes, to some extent, with the ghettoisation of science fiction. For Sontag, however, “Pornography is one of the
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