A psychoanalytic ethics of the pornographic aesthetic

Abstract

In his seminar on ethics, Lacan examines how certain forms of art reveal desire to us in ways that allow us to affirm and better handle it in our lives, and positions a psychoanalytic ethics in opposition to traditional ethics–what he describes as ‘the cleaning up of desire’, through ‘modesty’, and ‘temperateness’. This article asks: can this psychoanalytic ethics be applied to a pornographic aesthetic? Within the vast array of production and performance modalities that shape pornography in the digital era (including the digitized back catalogue), I argue something at once particular and universal in the pornographic aesthetic might be distinguished and articulated prior to any categorizatio..