However unsound these claims are not insane. 

Sexist advertising and the impulsive nature of the eye or the true message hidden in the blind spot

While we are making fun of sexist advertising, exchanging female for male objects the reaction misses one crucial point: the very object of the advertising is neither male nor female object. The true object is the PRODUCT. As a blind spot it instantiates itself in the unconscious.

Let's revive the whole thing and think beyond merely reacting upon what we see.

The reactions against sexist advertising spreads all around the web. How could one not react? The obvious reaction, to reject with abjection the sexist messages bombarding us in each and every corner of the eye, the obviousness of such a reaction is a flip side of the sexist logic. How?

Our negative reactions to sexist message are bound to same mechanisms of excitement as the sexist impulse aroused by porn. There is nothing truly reactionary save for the impulsive reaction as we “react”. Why?

Each advertising strategy is essentially sexist as it speaks to our immediate impulses.

Such is the power of advertising. It gives you what you do not want until you want it. The resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

The anti-sexist campaign manage to exchange the object but it still exposes the PRODUCT and in a truly dialectical way: now we have both sexist advertisement and its opposite at once. You are free to choose how to react. In either way you will be excited, engaged.

The anti-sexist campaign is caught in the same sexist logic although it actually tries to shake up the conformist ignorance providing enlightening what if examples. It ultimately fails to deliver a CRITIQUE as the entire logic of its gesture does not escape the sexist message.

Is it possible to react beyond the opposition which on both sides manage only to shift focus but not hit the core of the problem? In this case the problem is sexism. Not male, female but the sexism innate in the advertising strategies, inspiring a reaction for or against and yet exposing the PRODUCT.

And this is the advertising at its most effective. Its message will always be delivered. True dialectics, indeed. While politically correct “reactions” are expressed the product is the only thing that remains unchanged. The LOGO is still there. Attached to a breast or a beard, the point is not how we are advertised to BUY, what is the message. The tragedy, indeed a catastrophe of our attachment to advertising is that it works the second you cast the eye upon it.

The true effect of advertising lies not in your positive or negative reaction to its message but in the blind spot which injects the desire for the product.

A truly radical opposition to sexism will fail to affect the root of the problem while its strategy is (dis)organised as impulsive reaction caught in advertising game.

A truly radical opposition to sexism starts with careful examination of the nature of our reactions instead, with awareness of the same logic that underlies the object and the abject ALIKE. And herein lies the core of sexist success. It is reversible, it welcomes us all.

A suggested soundtrack to the reading: Diamanda Galas, Wild Women With the Steak Knives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUFw2fiksUc

Muse and the Real

The soul of the artist is moved by the beauty inspiring an image upon his vision. Thereof the work of art. Real beauty is forever external. Art acknowledges the intangibility of the real.

Christine Papin and the Mystery of Life

At the very end of his article on the case of Papin sisters (‘Motifs du crime paranoïaque’, Le Minotaure, December 1933, no. 3-4) Lacan highlights Christine Papin’s testimony in the court where she apparently said that in the deep wounds of her victims she perceived the “mystery of life”. It seems to me that Lacan leaves it to the reader to decide if Christine Papin actually became mad in the aftermath of the horrible act she committed together with her sister. In the article Lacan emphasizes the emotional motives of the sisters' crime, which according to Lacan is based on the problem inherent to the relation between the two sisters and to their victims to be. In another words, without going into detail of Lacan’s suggestions here, the crime of Papin sisters was, as I read Lacan, not caused by madness. It was a natural, however fatal reaction due to the circumstances of their frustrated situation which made it impossible for the two timid maids to become lovers. 

Christine’s “mystical experience” is a symptom of her loss. In her madness she recognizes the “mystery of life” in the bleeding wounds of her victim’s massacred bodies, her reaction suggests that she, like any other who was terrified by the Papin’s crime, was unable to understand what really happened, why she and her sister committed such a horrible act. She was separated from her sister during the trial, which caused her great suffering. Christine’s perception of the “mystery of life” suggests that madness perhaps offered her shelter for a moment, substituting morbid massacre with mystical vision, blinding her from the unbearable burden of guilt. Christine, confined in the asylum, desperately longing for her sister Lea whom she was not allowed to see… it was perhaps the guilt that after all led Christine to death by apathy and starvation…