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Book
ReviewCopulatory
Obsession and Missionary ZealThe Sexual Life of Catherine M. Catherine Millet, 2003.
London: Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77172-4 (paper), 223 pp. £6.99
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020502
ChrisShilling
University of Portsmouth
Some
authors choose to narrate their lives on the basis of the polit- ical campaigns
they have been involved with, seeking to relate priv- ate troubles to public
issues, while others move to the centre of their stories career, family, or
sporting and leisure interests. Catherine Millet takes a somewhat different
route: while her autobiography has been interpreted as a work of `libertine
philosophy', one would do it a disservice without saying that it was also,
or at least as much as, a chronicle of her life as a voyage of fucking. The
book is not about relationships, and nor is it about eroticism. To describe
it simply in terms of sex, moreover, would be do injustice to the mech- anical,
impersonal, visceral physicality that characteristically marked her encounters
with individuals, with couples, with small groups, and with numerous `partners'
in park benches, car parks, sports stadia, and at swingers' parties. This
is a book that insists we take bodily relationships and identities into account
when ana- lysing a life. The Sexual Life of Catherine M is an autobiography
that recounts the seemingly countless acts of sex Catherine Millet engaged
in on the basis of their relationship to `numbers', `space', `confined space'
and
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`details'.
Sex is both absolutely central to the narrative and also serves at times to
erase the author's cognitive identity in an inverted Cartesianism in which
the flesh becomes everything. Sexual acts were Catherine M's chosen mode of
being and communicating. They facili- tated an erasure of the self at times
and in places that were chosen, or consented to, by Millet — this is
not a tale that can be apprehended sympathetically through the interpretive
frame of subjection or oppression. How to narrate such a tale poses an obvious
challenge — words are so often treated as disconnected from the flesh
by the aca- demic who lives predominantly in a world of Foucauldian discourse,
textual analysis or cultural codes — but it is perhaps no surprise that
this Parisian art critic has no need to draw on Giddensian notions of `pure
relationships' (based on talk and `dialogical democracy') or on traditional
feminist notions of male domination or patriarchy. Instead, Bataille serves
as a more friendly resource, `a ready-made philosophy' to help describe the
difficulty at orgies of distinguishing between individual bodies, the sweat
and sperm `that dried along the tops of my thighs, sometimes on my breasts
or my face, even in my hair', and `the pleasure of sinking into a sea of undifferentiated
flesh' (pp. 52, 24, 99). It may be the fate of theory to be unable to capture
a life in all its complexity, and Millet reflects that her `copulatory obsession'
and `missionary zeal' derived more from a youthful playfulness than any libertine
philosophy (p. 52). If the body outruns and exceeds words and theories, however,
it does not necessarily make these redundant. Bataille apart, Millet also
reflects on how she `grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other
than those that other people set for me', that at orgies she was placed into,
and extricated from, circuits of sexual organs by her male partners, and that
it was not until she was 35 years old that she realized that her `own pleasure
could be the aim of a sexual encounter' (pp. 32, 200). There are glimpses
of other worlds, other relationships going on in this book that we want to
know more about. Perhaps there is after all a perfor- mativity on show in
this book that has been captured, if only in small part, by theories of the
`heterosexual matrix'. Nevertheless, Catherine Millet insists that she exercised
`complete free will' in her `chosen sexual life' (p. 63). Sociology has made
us aware of the vocations of politician and scientist. Here is a book that
shows us how it is possible to embark upon a more immanently physical vocation.
In order to understand the social contexts in which such a vocation can be
chosen and pur- sued we have to look elsewhere, yet this does not downgrade
the sig- nificance of Millet's autobiography. It stands as a story which
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illustrates
how it is possible to foreground the flesh in a manner, which does not make
it a simple appendage of some theory or other.