p.179
“While the tourist is away, this then moves to tracking down and capturing those images for oneself. And it ends up with the travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing to friends and family their version of the images they had seen before they set off.”
versions is the operative, here.
Which is to raise the phantom of the version, the quote, the appropriation. That if everything is already always a quotation or version or appropriation then who has stolen from who and in which way are we to decide who has done so productively, creatively? And who has stolen. Who is an artist and who is a criminal?
Watching a show about Jeffrey Dahmer a student had posted on FB. The interviewer was so obviously far more psychotic than Dahmer.
Is getting old recognising that my youthful fear of Dahmer was, merely, an identification? Is it not that I only became aware, by Dahmer, that each person has a set of desires some of which are deemed criminal and others which are not? Dahmer merely cannot not want to possess his lovers in a certain way. To murder them is far more honest than many of the ways in which my lovers have attempted to possess me. I would much rather have been eaten by Jeffrey Dahmer than been privy to the disgusting dishonestly and grotesque “complexity” of the braying liar who attempts to posit their inability to possess as they wish to my, and all of their exes naturally, other people’s “fear of commitment”. To be afraid to commit to someone deeply unpleasant is not a fear of commitment it is a distaste for the ugly.
(His special method of drilling a little hole in the victim’s skull, into which he injected acid and/or water in order to make them “zombies” is a fairly direct analogy for the desire of romantic love - to turn the partner into a monogamous, unquestioning, incapable buffoon capable only of the adoration of a tyrannical care giver. The zombie would have “loved” him because he would have cared for it, and that would have been reason enough.
The interviewers bizarre question about his homosexuality, and his bizarre answer also testify to a perversity not of Dahmer himself but of a pervasive (even to him) societal convention/contention that it is somehow his preference for men that contributed to his behaviour - that it was his homosexuality rather than his heterosexuality that led to his crimes. On the basis that we are all heterosexual (other-sexually oriented, towards an other regardless of gender) then could we suggest that in this case what the interviewer suggests is that it is Dahmer’s inability to love an other, someone other than himself homo-sexuality? A kind of mistaken auto-sexuality involving objects? Is this not also true, however of most love affairs which aim to please themselves quite by their desire to be loved rather than to love as such? To wish to be loved for being caring is to desire to be loved for not being loveable. It is to say that a cheap version of one is commensurate with an authentic version of another. Most persons despite their distaste for the idea would be radically happier with a very very rich sex doll than a partner. One who “understood” them - which is to say that the beloved accepted their “care” which is based on the lovers imagined system of what would be best for the beloved on the basis of how well they would then fit the lovers dreamed version. The question that the reviewer means to pose is, in fact, “Did being sexual, at all, contribute to your perversion?” or even “Was, despite everything and all the shite in between, Freud correct?” to which Dahmer’s answer “Yes” might then make some sense. Is is because of desire that we behave appallingly? Yes.)
Does Dahmer not teach us that an honest desire is only terrifying for a culture and society too sick to see its own depravity? Where we hold up the image of Dahmer as a card carrying serial killer we do so in order only to cover over the postively VAST number of radically dishonest mass-murderer bankers, politicians etc who kill in their thousands, daily, but in a bureaucratically and legally sanctioned way.
The complicity with the idea of Dahmer as monster betrays the toxic value of the bureaucrat who dreams of attaining the genocidal disinterestedness of the highly paid official who gambles with, the lives, health and life expectancy of the wage-slave poor, of their own and other countries, and continents.
What is disgusting about Dahmer is the truth of his “version” of desire, he says quite clearly that he aimed to possess entirely, and his method of doing so was to kill and fuck (and fuck around with) the bodies as signs and symbols. What is disgusting is that the official version is to fuck around with people, to kill them, but to do so at a distance.
It is better to be Adolf Eichmann than to be the Marquis de Sade, now.
'May she wake in torment!' he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in asudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion.
Bronte
"To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible."
De Sade