in on their territory, and to torture and kill any member of the gang who
wavers in his loyalty to it. I have heard real fear in the voices of those art
and poetry insiders who have confessed their doubts to me, and who
have wished they could escape the orthodoxy of their group; it was the
same fear that I sensed in a friend who fled Yugoslavia because he would
not break off his friendships with Muslims but could not take the threats
against his family.
What does one propose as the goal of art, when nature and the spir-
itual world are disallowed as foundations? Schjeldahl’s notion of beauty
(like Hickey’s) is a version of the French critical-theory concept, “jouis-
sance.” “Jouissance” is French for the pleasure of orgasm, and in the
hands of the followers of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques
Derrida is itself an appropriation, having been diverted from its lusty
and full-blooded carnal meaning to characterize a much thinner gruel
indeed: the “play of différance,” that is, the interest one gets from some-
thing that goes in a different way than one expected. “Différance” is a
French coinage by Jacques Derrida, combining the meanings of differ-
ence and deferral. The pleasure of “différance” can be interpreted as the
pleasure of deconstruction, that is, the tearing apart into meaningless
fragments of what previously was recognized as meaningful—and the
indefinite postponement of any final reference, significance, or value,
whether in nature or in the supernatural. In the absence of any natural or
spiritual foundations of pleasure—the generative urge toward natural
reproduction, which is now detached from sexuality, or the mystical urge
toward the vision of God, which is now discredited—this play of dif-
férances is about the only pleasure that can be intellectually defined. In
Michel Foucault’s last days in Berkeley, he provided an illustration of
what such an idea might mean in practice, by his enthusiastic participa-
tion, despite an infectious case of HIV, in the Bay Area’s S&M sex
scene—thus neatly combining the pleasure of doing the abnormal and
the destructive with the pleasure of “jouissance” in its literal sense. But
there is no blue sky, and no egg demanding to be fertilized, at the end of
that passageway. Fertility is forever deferred.
Sociologists connect gang membership with broken families—with
the separation of natural fertility from cultural connectedness. Gang
members try to find in the “jouissance” of social transgressiveness the
true familial love that is missing in their lives.
The aesthetic philosophers of postmodernism all believe beauty to
be, at bottom, the frisson attendant upon the exercise of power and the
crushing of obstacles to the will. Beauty is the pleasure of grinding one’s
teeth upon the innocent flesh of the world or of another person, the134 Frederick Turner