Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Do I eat to live or live to eat? I remember my grandma advising me as a child, "Eat slowly, you can eat more." Eating at my grandmother's table was a great childhood pleasure, a sensual pleasure, not unlike those earlier pleasures from which I now felt separate and apart. I cannot remember sucking at my mother's breast. It is as if I were not there yet, as if I came along later.

There is a gap between those earliest infantile years, and the years that follow puberty, which Freud calls the "latency period." It is a period during which genital organization is superimposed upon polymorphous perversity. The infantile body of human experience is plugged into the time machine. This re-programing of the body of human experience creates a seal between the pre-historic experience, and the experience of history. I can't remember being unplugged, and sucking on a breast post plugging is not the same experience.

The infant is under the sway of the pleasure principle, more unconscious than conscious. It is only by looking back through the lens of waking consciousness that I can identify myself at my mother's breast. That infantile body is undeveloped, unorganized; a polymorphous body. To organize the body as the family body is to sever those connections to unconscious process, so as to make identity possible; to manufacture a point of view from a raw material that has none. The unreal is realized.