more a “procedure” – as painstaking, literally, as any surgical procedure – to produce a Body without Organs – comprising habits, traits, potentials hidden in the actual body, i.e. a virtual body – and manufacture desire continuously. Less the “exorcising” of anguish to indulge one’s taste for masochistic pleasures. I have it wrong.
What I thought was happening was that the exorcism of pity and anguish affirmed in masochistic desire its positivity, the positivity of its possibility, therefore the virtuality of the BwO. However, the point Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet make is that in order to affirm masochistic desire anguish need not be exorcised. “Traverse,” says Lacan, “your desire.” “Love,” writes Zizek, “your symptom.”
A passion configures an affective and sensible circuit, which precedes subjects and from which work and viewer, audient proceed. The something that happens in the life of the work leaps the boundary of representation and crosses from one territory into another, is always crossing until work and viewer, after disconcertingly bumping into one another, again stand apart, restabilise themselves in recognising each other.
The question is: does this circuit involve pity and anguish? Clearly desire wants for nothing, therefore nothing is undesirable, neither anguish nor pity. Nothing is to be “exorcised,” then, in order to produce the plane on which and by which desire sets out. But does the procedure itself, the circuit, somehow exorcise?
I have in mind a trial, a test, or a spiritual exercise, that we undergo and which is difficult, risky and painful. In the tradition of preparing to undergo such a trial, something is put aside, so that the trial itself has an aspect of exorcism to it. The preparation involves representing the self in a way that its illusory nature becomes by stages clearer and clearer to us.
The trial exorcises our self or de-subjectifies us to the end of removing anguish about the loss of self and pity for the other’s loss of self. The other, here, would be the passional actor and the trial might be compared to the spectacle of a passion.
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