k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium:

What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic.

For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. As Renata Salecl argues in (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed by the news that, when an orang-utan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating. The orang-utan had been inducted into human sexuality by the ‘inhuman partner’, the fantasmatic supplement, upon which all human sexuality depends. —k-punk [Aug 2006]

Capitalized Phrases analysis:

Eyes Wide Shut – J. G. Ballard – Jacques Lacan – William Burroughs – – Renata Salecl – Boschian – Jean Baudrillard – Sigmund Freud – Delvaux – Helmut Newton – David Cronenberg – Immanuel Kant – Marquis de Sade – Sacher-Masoch – Jonathan Weiss – Dior – Chanel – Iain Sinclair