Free Remittance Girl e-books

In a small effort to give something back to the world in this time of crisis and fear, I thought I’d post my books online, for free, as an escape from the constant worries that we are all facing. These are offered in PDF format. I will try, when I get some time, to also Continue Reading

Realism vs Reality: the foreshortening of meaning.

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian by Tom Sutcliffe on Gaspar Noé’s most recent film ‘Love’. It brings up the interesting question of whether fiction has the capacity to say more to us than reality and, if so, why? Many women prefer erotica over porn, and they are often painted as prudes. Of course, Continue Reading

The Reader / Writer Conspiracy & the Hackneyed Ellipsis of the Real

How might fictional prose be framed in terms of Lacan’s Three Orders? Lacan described the human psyche as operating on three different ‘orders’ or registers: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As speaking beings, we live in all three orders simultaneously, but not always consciously. They are experiential modes –  ways of experiencing reality Continue Reading

From Sin to Superficiality: Erotic Narratives

Erotic fiction is often narrated in first person, or third person proximate, attempting to give the reader an experience of the story’s eroticism from inside the mind and the body of the narrator. In this way, it has the capacity to do what image-based pornography (which almost always situates the viewer as voyeur) cannot do; Continue Reading

The Safety of Desire

“desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits For Lacan, desire and fantasy are the life- and self-preserving strategies we use to keep us from slipping into a mindless and self-destructive pursuit of jouissance. Desires and the fantasies we construct around them are firmly rooted in language. Continue Reading

What Is Not Shown – Part 2

If you haven’t read part 1 of this post, it might be helpful to do that before continuing to this one, since I set up arguments in the first that I extrapolate on here. What Zizek implies in Interrogating the Real is that we, as subjects acting within our cultural paradigms, have a very strong Continue Reading

What Is Not Shown

In her book, Resisting Nudities: A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism, Florence Dee Boodakian points out that when it comes to cultural restrictions on nudity, apparent modesties quite often tend to draw attention to what is being ‘hidden'(13). The thong bikini is a case in point: where tiny pieces of cloth actually serve to call attention Continue Reading

Susan Sontag’s Essay on The Pornographic Imagination

Here is The-Pornographic-Imagination-by-Susan-Sontag From her collection of essays in Styles of Radical Wills. There is also a lovely youtube video of a lecture where she talks about the pornographic comedic interchange.

“I’m Not Fucking, I’m Talking to You”, or I Could be Fucking You.

In Lacan’s Seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in his attempt to explain how sublimation of desire works and how closely it is tied to language, he says: Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression. In other words —for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I Continue Reading

Porn Survey – Results & Thoughts

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you who took the time to participate in my very quick, informal porn survey. And an even bigger thank you to those who commented, elaborated, or offered their thoughts when none of the options fit the way in which you use porn. (Just a note, if you Continue Reading