The Trouble with Pleasure by Aaron Schuster;

Author:Aaron Schuster;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-02-22T21:02:02+00:00

Chapter 4

To Have Done with Lack

The Artist and the Panther

Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” recounts the fate of a unique kind of performance artist, a “specialist in the art of fasting.” It is said that fasting came easily to this showman, since he couldn’t find any food to his liking. Once a popular attraction, the hunger artist ends his days in a sad circus cage, unrecognized and unloved; he is finally replaced by his seeming opposite, a fearsome panther who is the very image of health and power. “The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought to him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away.”1 Does not the contrast between the miserable hunger artist and the noble panther exemplify, in an ironic way, the divide between Lacan and Deleuze? While the hunger artist is a living embodiment of the lack of desire, a witness to impossibility of jouissance and the futile quest for the unattainable lost object—“no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by turning around the eternally lacking object”2—the panther stands for desire’s overflowing exuberance, its “profound and almost unlivable Power.”3 And in the end, it is the panther who fascinates while the emaciated artist is doomed to wither away, becoming the pure lack that he seeks.

The animal vitalism that concludes Kafka’s tale recalls a relatively neglected passage from Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” Narcissism is typically understood in terms of the drives’ investment of the image of the ego, a love of self made possible through the mediation of idealized representations, in the first place the projected image of the surface of the body. But for Freud this was only one of the possible meanings of the term. He also speaks of narcissism as an “unassailable libidinal condition,” a kind of invincibility or self-sufficiency that is manifest in particular by young children, animals like cats and beasts of prey, great criminals, and beautiful women.

The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self- contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind—an unassailable libidinal condition which we ourselves have since abandoned.

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