However, I find it interesting that Scarry has completely missed her target when discussing critiques of beauty.  Certainly such critiques exist, but they tend to emphasize, for example, beauty’s role in a patriarchal or Foucauldian technology of power.  Scarry, on the other hand, is interested in a kind of eternal beauty, something universal, ultimately cross-cultural, and immanent in beautiful objects.  She dismisses the critiques of beauty as “incoherent,” abstracting them from the sociological and historical conditions that they are more comfortable in (though they are not so much abstracted as misunderstood).

And yet Scarry’s positive appreciation of beauty is more convincing (even as her examples seem trite to me).  Perhaps I am a less rigorous mind, but it does not seem to me like an irresolvable paradox that beauty could be 1) used to distract from the political, 2) erase the history and/or agency of the beautiful object, and simultaneously 3) encourage us towards a more engaged attention to the world.  Scarry makes it seem as if such a thought is impossible to entertain, either by those of “us” who love beauty, or by “they” who criticize it.  However, I have a hard time seeing how one could possibly deny any of the three propositions.  Does someone who reads Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle simply blind their self Oedipus Rex style?  Will a scholar in the tradition of Bernard Berenson deny that there is something less than “disinterested” in the use of the female nude in Western art?  No semi-conscious human being could systematically deny merit from any of the fundamental positions.

Scarry calls these critiques of beauty “political,” by which she means that they accuse beauty of being antipathetic to justice.  However, these critiques are political in a much broader way: a political analysis, if it can be distinguished from a philosophical one, is not primarily interested in the truth of contradictory claims, but rather on how such claims are negotiated, at least since Hobbes’s dictum auctoritas non veritas facit legem.  The Leviathan does not arbitrate between men who are just and unjust, or those who tell lies or tell truths; it just decides.  Scarry might argue that this is thus not justice; but it is equally true that the city-state which Plato erected in the name of justice is not politics.  The modern political field is a struggle between unstable truths, the arbitration of power and justice between such truths, but not a validation of any one truth.

This may seem dogmatic, or perhaps too readily accepting of Liberal politics, which focus on the negotiation between represented interests.  However, even if we were to consult Carl Schmitt, Liberalism’s mid-century adversary, we can see in his radically conservative philosophy the inheritance of Hobbes.  It might seem that Schmitt’s definition of politics, as the distinction between friend and enemy, and the subsequent definition of the enemy as an alien and existential threat, would leave little room for negotiation.  In practical terms, it does not.  Even Schmitt recognized, however, in a comment on a passage of Kierkegaard’s, that the exception and the norm are mutually defining, and that ultimately the norm rests on the exception.  He was speaking of the state of emergency, but it applies equally to the distinction of self and enemy.  The ultimate political moment is when the enemy is identified, because that simultaneously constructs the political self: that there may be no existential difference prior to that moment is irrelevant ( it is hard to imagine what such a difference might be theoretically, but practically examples are legion).  In other words, the truth of the division between self and enemy, the substance of the distinction, is irrelevant.  It is the moment of decision itself which constitutes a social body politically.  Bellum non veritas facit patriam.

This suggests to me that, if the problem of beauty involves balancing paradoxical notions, then, if a decision, some kind of taking sides, is necessary, we are left as arbiters with only two tools: truth on the one hand and politics on the other.  Truth must render all but one narrative illegitimate (hence Scarry’s insistence that critiques of beauty are “incoherent”); politics attempts to find the balance, to understand who benefits from what truth.  It is a less naive, more robust, and ultimately more aesthetic tool than Scarry’s reductive analysis.

The most interesting problem with Terry Jones’ “bonfire of the pieties” is that it is isomorphically identical to an act of terrorism.  It is a speech act which threatens to create a situation of violence, and the use of such a speech act as a threat is usually referred to as blackmail.  Whether the preacher from Gainesville intended to blackmail the United States or threaten US soldiers and diplomats overseas is irrelevant; his (now aborted) statement is formally identical to the terrorist act, except that the promised violence is a consequence and not a cause of the mediated statement itself.  The order of operations is transposed, but the relationship is intact: it is an act of speech of which incites a climate of fear, nudging the polity toward a state of war.  That this act involves no illegal destruction of property or persons should not cloud or analysis — it is only a sentimentalism which would prevent us from seeing that the importance of the September 11th attacks has nothing to do with downtown real estate or a few thousand lives.  It effectively inaugurated an era in which terrorism is no longer a criminal act, but an act of war, over which law (domestic and international) has only a tenuous grasp.

The importance of such a speech act is that the war it attempts to fight is not a physical war; it does not seek the corporeal destruction of the enemy, at least not by acts of terrorism.  It seeks, instead, to engage the enemy in symbolic war, to draw them into a particular world view.  So, as the United States tries to dismantle terror networks, invades countries which supposedly shelter terrorists, and attempts a spatio-geographic containment of radical Islam, it is in some ways fighting a different war.  The symbolic and the material war are connected, but often with very different strategies.  One might argue that we are very much winning the war on the ground (exemplum gratii), but losing symbolically; our own logic is moving steadily closer to that of our enemy’s.  Instead of criminalizing terrorism (the modus operandi against Timothy Mcveigh and still the weapon of choice against Christian, anti-government terrorism), we have increasingly understood terrorists as existential enemies, without political goals or negotiable aims.  We have positioned terrorists at the very edge of the flat world of communicative reason; we cannot negotiate because we literally cannot talk to the enemy.  This leaves Liberalism no choice but eradication: even a good center left liberal like Michael Ignatieff is forced to conclude that, in the absence of a common ground of secular humanism, carthago delanda est.

But I also agree with Devji that “The truly interesting thing about the controversy, in other words, is neither Islam nor even ‘Islamophobia’ but the transformation of right wing politics in the United States.”  This is what I have been trying to demonstrate in the last couple posts, that this debate is both a transformation and an extension of conservative thought — it cannot be seen as purely opportunist, but is developing a conservative line of argument about the centrality of “culture” to the identity of the nation.

Devji’s point about the de-centralized structure of the right wing movement and the peripheral role of the Republican Party in the formation of conservatism is interesting.  This is certainly one of the major developments of the past ten years, accelerated by the first Obama administration.  This movement allows the Republican Party to point to “grassroots” movements and “outsider voices” to achieve its own policy goals.  Devji understands that this movement is independent of the Republican Party, and it is my argument here that its independence from the party is what makes it politically useful.  What Devji has to say on this point is instructive:

“In the US … the crisis of authority among conservatives might have moved against political institutions but certainly not beyond them. What has been lost in the debate has been any claim to authoritative speech or knowledge, as demonstrated by so many of the arguments against the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ or about President Obama’s religion and place of birth. This is simply the consequence of a media-driven society with multiple sources of information that can no longer be contained within any effective hierarchy of knowledge.”

In other words, what was once a hierarchy of speech (the authority of the party or the media to issue definitive statements that might carry the qualities of being “newsworthy” or “truth”) has been flattened and expanded.  The echo-box metaphor now well understood to rule the media operates not on a dichotomy of authoritative speech and illicit speech, but rather self and other speech.  In other words, if you want to create an issue or report a dubious piece of news it is enough simply to cite that someone else has said this or that.  This operation is relatively common for conservatives as to become a bit cliché: the Republican Party can approvingly discuss any number of hard right-wing issues, showing that it is the Tea Party Movement (and not the party) which is endorsing them.

For the media itself, the question is more perplexing.  For example, while there is no general controversy regarding the Quran burning (even the most xenophobic public officials wince at the thought), the story has become the possible reaction of the “Muslim world”: a very possibility created by the media coverage itself.  So the question of why such an event is newsworthy is difficult to answer: it seems to be newsworthy only because of the possible fallout, but this amounts to saying it is notable because it has been widely noted.  So while the importance of the event is only a direct consequence of its being reported, the media can still claim that it is news because someone else is the immediate actor.  Just as the media require an outside agent to legitimate its own internal production of news, political parties increasingly need para-party structures.  It is the safest way to take the most reckless path: when things go wrong, the people need only point to the party as the culprit, and meanwhile the party can point to the para-party structures as the real radicals.

The problem for conservatives, actually, is that there is a fairly serious paradox inherent in this practice.  What has defined conservatism, after all, in the past 200 years of western politics is fear of the masses, and the belief that it is traditional elites who should guide them, not a government founded on majoritarianism or equality.  The Republicans are playing fast and loose with the leveling effects of modern telecommunications and culture.  Within the conservative tradition in the 20^th century, several solutions have presented themselves to limit the power of democratization.  In the United States over the last half century, Neoconservatives have tried to marry “values” and free market fundamentalism, the former intended to fill the void created by the latter’s steady destruction of community, family, tradition, etc.  It was specifically Leo Strauss who resurrected Plato’s “noble lie” to create the kind of social cohesion necessary to keep order despite an obviously unequal economic order.

In the “Ground Zero Mosque” debate, then, the appeal to “sensitivity” toward a majoritarian sensibility is a way of inventing such a nationalist culture, united (as victim) against Islam, and placing such a culture above law, as overriding law.  While there is nothing new about political bogey men, the driving tension is now how egalitarian technologies can be manipulated to legitimate conservative cultural norms.  The current debate, then, can be seen as an exercise in how the institutions of conservatism can control, channel, and maintain such “populist” movements.

As I expressed previously, I think that the whole debate is an exercise by the right of inventing the enemy. Whereas Al-Qaeda has been identified since 2001 as the responsible party for the World Trade Center attack, outright suspicion of Islam has been boiling below the surface. Now, it seems, some are testing to see if the religion as a whole can be effectively painted as “the enemy.” So, although I am about to seriously examine the premises of those who would protest the building of Cordoba House, I must insist that this argument is outrageously misdirected, tactical, and reckless. Nonetheless, it is not unheard of for an argument to fail in its inception, but to succeed in planting its form, the skeleton of the argument, complete with its premises and assumptions, into the public discourse.

Those who would protest the building of an Islamic community center near the former World Trade Center argue that it is disrespectful to do so, that it is uncivil. If it seems strange to a political theorist that a debate might rage over good manners, it shouldn’t. Slavoj Zizek recently argued that western laws and liberties seem to rest on an unspoken exception, much as he has argued that universal, ethical systems also have some internalized “gap” that they must ignore. A legal system based on reason or universal rights, Zizek suggests, preserves itself by withholding in certain circumstances the exercise of those rights. To exercise a right in such a way that makes it imperative to limit that right damages its credibility. The only way to preserve this right, then, is civility – i.e. the capacity to know when a right is best left un-exercised.

This is an interesting take on Carl Schmitt’s other well known theoretical formulation, that the law must be violated in order to be sustained if under grave threat. This violation is the state of emergency, and it can exist because law based on the operation of a norm. Legality/illegality is thus replaced by the norm and its exception. This is the logic that allows the declaration of emergency powers and suspension of law to save law. Schmitt believed that the law could not be self-sufficient, and never account for its own suspension – emergency powers could not be codified, and the belief that sovereignty lay in the law was foolish. Ultimately, it is not the law but a person who will decide if a situation of emergency exists – this person is thus sovereign, and it is their voice which has, in Giorgio Agamben’s idiom, the force of law without law.

What makes Schmitt so relevant to other conservative thinkers is that, as far back as Edmund Burke, they have been incredibly mistrustful of legal codes which are based on ideas of universal justice or reason, and prefer instead the traditional structures (and hierarchies) in society. Perry Anderson writes about this line of thought in his essay on “The intransigent right,” demonstrating how conservatives, Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek in particular, formulated their attack on the state as a kind of enterprise for achieving human potential, preferring instead “organic” institutions which operated without centralized goals and largely dominated by elites. While it may narrow Schmitt’s meaning of “norm” and stretch Zizek’s “civility,” there is a basic similarity to the ideas: that law is not self-sustaining, and hidden within law is an idea of normative behavior which is not legislated, but is necessary to the continuance of law.

The conservative argument, then, that an Islamic community center ought not to be built near “Ground Zero” is, rather than a pragmatic argument, actually a completely ideological one. It seems to suggest that the legal right to freedom of religious practice must be superseded by a majoritarian orthodoxy. While certainly being opportunistic, the right is also making an attempt to place strict socio-cultural norms above the operation of the law (a tactic they are rather familiar with, for example by harassing abortion clinic workers in communities with a pro-life majority). The sponsors of the Cordoba House thus stand accused, essentially, of incivility – they had the audacity to exercise their rights when they ought to have forfeited them.

The right, however, has confounded Zizek’s point; for the Cordoba House to act in a “civil” manner, it must give up freely its right to build on the spot. With the amount of pressure that is being put on the community center to leave, civility is no longer an option, only capitulation or defiance. As it is now, it is impossible for them to retreat from the plan without simultaneously damaging the legal right would have been protected had they declined to build there in the first place. Thus the only way to protect the right to religious freedom, association, and speech, is to stand in defiance of the anti-Muslim forces.

And finally, the right has confounded even itself. Truly the test case for such “civility” is not the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” but the burning of the Quran that a preacher in Gainesville, Florida is planning for September 11. The same people who might claim that the community center in Lower Manhattan is disrespectful should look with much greater alarm at what promises to be a speech-act that will inflame anti-American sentiments worldwide. How to understand these two flipsides of the same coin, recto et verso. The ACLU might assert the right of each organization to do as it pleases; conservatives might condemn both as abuses of rights and liberties; and many others will defend one or the other for this or that reason. I mean to simply point out that the question goes well beyond tests of “imminent danger” and “shouting ‘fire’ in a theater” which tend to populate free speech debates. It is no longer a secret that such rights are under attack – it is now openly opined that the era of civil rights is in twilight. The question is now the foundation of the law, and whether the law (and politics) can accommodate everything within itself, or must it accept that a majority of public conduct remains outside it, and should be forfeited to mechanisms like the market, religion, or tradition to regulate.

One of the many problems with this is, of course, the President does not make laws; this is not simply a technical issue, but it is Obama engaging on the weakest ground of his constitutional and actual power.  In Anthony Skowronek’s thesis, presidential power is largely constituted by the ability to dismantle a policy regime, not create one with lots of new legislation.  Even within the legislative arena, it is certainly easier for Obama to force Bush-era legislation to lapse without renewal than to pass, for example, new taxes on the wealthy.  If the president seems ineffective, it may be because legislative regimes always operate with one hand tied back.

Podesta also says that, because Obama’s efforts are focused on pushing bills through a divided Capitol Hill, his claims to “post-partisanship” are difficult to maintain.   Obama’s appeal to legislators, particularly at the beginning of his presidency, was that we needed to pass laws to deal with precipitate crises; partisanship was stalling such legislation; and hence we needed to enter into a new consensus-driven politics.  This is a complete fiction.  The problem with passing laws is not partisanship — which should, after all, represent real differences in the polity, and are hence ontologically prior to politics — but with the structures that have traditionally forced consensus.  Without recourse to the filibuster, a weapon of last resort to force a majority to consider the sincere interests of the minority, a 60 seat majority would not be required by Democrats to pass legislation.  Similarly, if party discipline was stronger (i.e. if partisanship was more persistent), then legislation would not be so laden with favors to particular Senators to prevent their defection.  This argument has been developed at more length by Chantal Mouffe and others in the “agonistic” school of thought, who argue that war, not dialog, is the appropriate model for politics.  That Republicans and Democrats are in a virtual state of war is relatively self-evident: take the New York state senate, for example, which seems to have descended into a Hobbesian state of nature.  The problem may be that in this “war,” the mechanisms of consensus prevent any side from actually winning the war, and hence being able to create legislation.

Obama (and every political theorist) seems to want to be a Solon — a figure whose judgement was so universally respected that the warring factions in Athens agreed to give him total power if only he could end the perpetual political strife.  The right, with its defining fear of popular will, understands better than the left the ambiguity of Solon, a figure who rules for the common good, but absolutely.

I’m less interested in the “framing” debate, not because I don’t think communication is important, but because it is either rendered in implausible psychological categories (Lakoff’s father figure), or reduced to an echo chamber relationship between the president, the media, and the public.  While there is value in the latter as a sociological description, it is too “agnostic,” and seems to suggest that framing devices are only as good as they are effective — in other words, Presidential communication has nothing to do with helping the public realize its own interests and collective ambitions, but is a mere fiction allowing lawmakers to pass laws according to their own judgement of the public good (or whatever).  However: President Obama’s unwillingness to articulate a “loftier” goal has been frustrating, not because I want him to adopt the cynical “framing” strategy, but because by ignoring it he seems to confirm the cynicism of “framing”: the communication of political ideals must, by its very impossibility, be a cynical act.

If I had to take a stab at what the Obama presidency is “about,” in some larger thematic, I would say it is a logical extension of the Presidency of Bush the Younger.  Analogous to Clinton’s deregulation or Reagan’s optimism is Bush’s security — particularly national security, but also against any threat which could be identified so as to bolster the administration’s domestic and foreign agendas.  Obama has essentially expanded this approach to energy, the economy, and health care: his most important agenda items have emphasized staving off imminent threats to the collective well-being.  He has not emphasized the same foreign-policy security issues that George W. Bush did (though he has been as alarmist as every Republican can and every Democrat must), but the climate of emergency has hardly dissipated: environmental degradation, the economy, and nuclear proliferation have assumed the eschatological proportions that Al Qaeda and Iraqi WMD did in the Bush administration.  This is the security presidency part II.

What am I making?  Well, here’s a hint:

acreresidency.wordpress.com

I’m going to try to post a little bit here and there.  This particular return to the blog-medium was prompted by this quote from the NYT (“G.O.P. Seizes on Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections,” 16 Aug. 2010):

‘“Ground zero is hallowed ground to Americans,” Elliott Maynard, a Republican trying to unseat Representative Nick J. Rahall II, a Democrat, in West Virginia’s Third District, said in a typical statement. “Do you think the Muslims would allow a Jewish temple or Christian church to be built in Mecca?”’

This is a statement of astounding narrow-mindedness.  It is such a strange package of assumptions and unclarified prejudices that, although I’m sure my effort will go unappreciated by Mr. Maynard, I must assume the task of drawing out some questions that the quote raises.

Let’s start with hallowed ground.  Before getting into the issue of what constitutes sacred territory in a contemporary Republic, I think the concept itself is actually rather self-evident within the discourse and representations of American History.  Think Gettysburg Address (“we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”)  What is interesting is the very un-Lincoln proposition that a mosque would somehow impinge upon this sacredness, that such sacred ground is in fact quite vulnerable to our not-so-poor “power to add or detract.”  It turns out this hallowed ground does not in fact transcend our contemporary politics — it is all too dependent, it seems, on sound-byte political culture.

Turning now to the question of “hallowed ground,” this is in fact an incredibly bizarre claim to make about downtown real estate.  The original towers, products of a capitalization of space which replaces place specificity with the abstract figures of square feet and their monetary value, by their symbolic destruction seem to have restored place-hood to the World Trade Center.  While such tensions always exist between space and place, it is this particularly capitalized version of space and its sudden, traumatic conversion to sacred place that dramatizes the tension.

This is, oddly, Baudrillard’s argument almost exactly regarding the destruction of the towers — that terrorists, rather than subscribing to the logic of capitalist value, engaged in the “gift giving” logic of potlatch.  They gave us death; we must return in kind.  Baudrillard’s argument revolves around how the market activity which is global and perpetual was momentarily halted by the destruction of the towers — and it seems that this halting has in fact turned into a full retreat as far as the space of the towers themselves are concerned.  The sacred has a way of eliminating profane origins, and we should not forget that, to some extent, the transformation of the towers into sacred space is within the logic of the “holy war.”  Such consecration can be a powerful symbolic tool, and we should not forget that what “ground zero” is to Mr. Maynard is what Waco, Texas is to many potential domestic terrorists.  Perhaps Lincoln was simply being prudent in refusing responsibility for consecrating Gettysburg — sacred places have a powerful and unpredictable effect in symbolic war.

The latter half of Mr. Maynard’s statement is much less subtle in its implications, but equally strange: “the Muslims” are suddenly an undifferentiated population; they are furthermore clearly constructed as “the enemy,” and the implication is that they are collectively responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center; and, most paradoxically, we should not allow them to build on our sacred ground because they would not allow us to do so.  The passage systematically invents the enemy, identifies him as the enemy, and then exhorts us to do as the enemy does: invent and persecute an enemy.  Mr. Maynard here has become the perfect mirror for holy war; he reproduces exactly the logic of his own invented nemesis.  Perhaps this is inevitable — if “the Muslim” is so much a product of Mr. Maynard’s imagination, it is hardly surprising that its logic is his own.

Carl Schmitt, the most prominent legal theorist of the Third Reich, is the pole star for such discussions: construction of “the enemy” was, in his formulation, the very essence of the political act.  The enemy, as opposed to the competitor, was not simply a foe with whom one struggled for position or resources, but one who was existentially different — whose very essence and existence were a threat to the polity’s way of life.  Schmitt inverted Clausewitz’s dictum of war as an extension of politics — war is the telos of politics. What is so infuriating about Mr. Maynard’s comments, aside from its ignorance and prejudice, is that he has failed even on Schmitt’s terms, because he has become the enemy.  Islam, as Mr. Maynard constructs it here, is not in its essence a threat to the American way of life, because by his own logic it is equivalent to the American way of life: “they” are an intolerant society of religious zealots, and so are we.

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

J.S.O.C.’s [Joint Special Operations Command] special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has made an observation crucial to understanding the place of art and law.  What does it mean to paint on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend?  In Hans Hoffman’s The Search for the Real in Painting, the real is found to resonate in the picture plane by the interaction of the elements therein, primarily form, line, and color.  Hoffman states that every canvas begins with a primary reference in the edges of the picture plane, the first “lines” of our painting.  We do not have borders on our expansive picture plane, but instead frontiers, areas beyond which we have not seen, have not acted. Our canvas is so vast that we cannot even comprehend the Real which we are attempting to make it resonate with.   We see only the field of action (or “executive action,” if you will), the “surrealistic” space without reference beyond itself.  Imagining a canvas so big that its edges cannot even be comprehended, we can concentrate on that which is within our particular view — on a small facet of the picture plane, and around us we can see only territory, far into the distance.  We begin our search for the Real, to resonate within this field, but we can walk miles  and miles upon this field, and will find no end, not even an interruption.  The global war on terror is a remarkably descriptive title.  If “war” denotes the field of action, then the canvas is in fact global and seamless, and we may walk on its surface till our feet bleed, and still find only our red foot prints.

When I walked into Paul Chan’s exhibit at the Renaissance Society, I expected to see nine portraits of the Justices of the Supreme Court, which I had seen reproduced alongside newspaper reviews and press releases. It took me fifteen minutes of walking around the small gallery to realize that the portraits were hung at the absurd height of several meters high. At such a height, the portraits did not seem like lords ruling above we lowly serfs, but rather made them comically cut off, as if they existed in a higher atmosphere, like aristocrats in hot air balloons breathing the finer aether of the upper air. The drawings, which have the look of an official portrait, betray themselves; each justice has a pair of rubbery lips curled in an odd smirk, looking like a slightly embarrassed fish. Despite the pristine order of the Renaissance Society gallery, Chan managed to evoke the tawdriness of a bureaucratic hallway.  Rather than the grandeur of the Supreme Court’s chamber, the installation recalls the awkwardly proportioned halls of the court in Kafka’s The Trial.

My Laws Are My Whores, installation view.

My Laws Are My Whores.

On the opposite side of this wall is a video projection, Untitled (After a Certain Chateau), a reference perhaps to the castle in the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. In the video, human figures vibrate furiously in sexual positions amidst the silhouettes of rectangles and arches. The shapes signify perhaps windows, perhaps portraits, a chateau or a portrait gallery. Either way, they connote the “official space” of an institution, though apparently an ill-kept one: slowly, one at a time, the rectangles begin to tilt and eventually fall off the wall altogether. The figures, meanwhile, continue their revelries at an inhuman speed. The effect is like a video stuck alternating between two frames, so the figures appear to vibrate, constantly caught replaying some tiny movement, unable either to abandon or complete it. The revelers seem to repeatedly flip between the two poles of Sade’s sexuality, the libertine excess and its ultimate disappointment. Desire, once excited, imagines endless repetitions, but once satiated, as Sade wrote, “one always has too much when one has had enough.” No matter how transgressive, every sexual act becomes mundane with infinite repetition. The only thing desire cannot withstand is satiety. The limit to transgression, the point at which it is completely self-defeating, is the act of murder, which renders the object of torture (and the torturer’s pleasure) numb and inert.

Untitled (After a Certain Chateau).

Murder kills passion, and it is passionless murder that Sade found completely insensible. The travesty of the laws is not that they kill and punish, but that they do so without pleasure. The state imprisons, tortures, and kills because the laws dictate it must, and all the while the keepers of the law remain separated, detached. Law never kills for pleasure, and hence it is never satiated. Sade gave no value to human life as such, but the man who sought out eccentricities found this legal murder flatly perverse: “an ambitious sovereign can destroy, at his ease and without the least scruple, the enemies prejudicial to his grandiose designs … Cruel laws, arbitrary, imperious laws can likewise assassinate millions of individuals and we, feeble and wretched creatures, we are not allowed to sacrifice a single being to our vengeance or our caprice!” On a table to one side of the gallery, Chan placed a keyboard with keys molded like gravestones, out of which a cord dangled onto the ground, the male end of a plug exposed on the floor. A state execution lacks the passion or caprice of murder, and Chan’s blank graves, equated with the seriality of a keyboard, portray death as ultimately anonymous. As Sade put it, “virtue, vice, all are confounded in the grave.”

Writing mostly from prison, he could only fantasize about the crimes he wished to commit, but this probably served his purposes better than any massacre. The disappointment of pleasure, the coincidence of satiety and repulsion, the enough that is too much, left only the image of sex, its elaboration through narrative and fantasy. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, “It was not murder that fulfilled Sade’s erotic nature; it was literature.” Without description, without the duplication of the sexual act in writing, sex becomes obscene, not because it displays uncovered bodies, but because the sexual act is uncovered by any meaning (romance, love, even desire). It becomes a random biological act, an intermediate term between birth and death.

Along the long wall of the gallery, Chan has ten framed paper sheets, each representing a different body, some taken from Sade’s fiction. On the sheets are written a string of words, sometimes simply sounds, mapped over the alphabet and select punctuation, and each sheet seems to describe the sexuality of the depicted character. The work entitled The Body of Oh Narcisse is a string of pre-verbal noises, while The Body of Oh Justine is a long series of misfortunes and resistances, echoing the heroine of Sade’s novella, the victim of a constant barrage of vice. It is appropriate that the bodies of these figures are composed of language, because it is only with language that life, even sexual life, becomes more than a physical fact of existence and gains meaning. Ultimately it is the body of language itself that Chan is interested in. By mapping sexual utterances over the alphabet, he tinkers with the anatomy of language, its basic parts, till it is unavoidably sexual. These “fonts” are available for download online.

The Body of Oh . . . , installation view.

The Body of Oh Justine.

Chan uses this Sadean strategy, of corrupting language itself, to subvert the language of law. In law, language gains deadly force, sometimes by bringing the violence of the state fully to bear on its object, but at least as often by removing its protections, by casting a minority as outside of the law. Chan resists this in a two-fold way: he exposes the substitution of the body by language, its embodiment of sexuality, and then he attempts to re-inscribe the legal, authoritative language of law with the subjective, almost pre-verbal utterances of pleasure. In The Mother of All Episodes, a video work displayed on the floor of the gallery, footage from an episode of Law & Order is subtitled with the episode’s script written in Chan’s sexualized fonts. The string of moans passing along the bottom of the screen while the police are interrogating a murder suspect was at first comic, as I tried to calibrate the image to the text underneath it. The result is a suggestive nonsense, a reversal that renders the law ridiculous. Together, Chan’s videos and word portraits demonstrate how the language of law displaces the body as the battleground over sexuality. As the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres used piles of candy or stacks of paper to take the place of a lost bodily presence, so Chan’s framed sheets seem to represent the bodies lost in the abstraction of law.