Becomings-Cunt

Becomings-Cunt: Flesh, Fold and Infinity signification: head as seat of logic, face as signifying plane of subjectivity, race, age, genitals as signifier of gender and possible sexuality and sexual configurations in relation This article positions female genitalia as a model through with other subjects. Becoming investigates and exploits which a project of becoming may be launched. Female the relations between these forces of subjugation and seeks genitalia should not be understood as metaphor or as tactics to reorient the strata indefinitely. Becoming does a reflection applied to a becoming after the project. not become, it launches projects of differentiation through Becoming-cunt engages with the materiality of both affinity with various terms to deterritorialise the constant becoming and the cunt as fleshly, risky and challenging reiteration of subjectivity as returning to ‘itself’. In this to the basic dominant paradigms of thought and subjec- article the cunt is used as a becoming because it values tivity. Briefly, becoming, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix certain principles without fetishising the subject ‘woman’, Guattari, is a project where one enters into an unnatural and because it defies many dominant conceptual para- alliance with another term, in order to transform. Some digms without necessarily exchanging them for other par- of Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestions include becom- adigms. It does not oppose dominant culture with another ing-dog and becoming-woman. However the desire for culture, but with multiplicity, indeterminacy and infinity. becoming is not a desire to become. It is not mimicry, like- Becoming-cunt is, put simply, configuring the flesh and ness, imitation or metaphor. Becoming takes the aspects subjectivity differently, and doing different things with it of the becoming term and through engaging with aspects which involute it with other things in different ways, all of the term alters the trajectories of existence. One enters of which continue a trajectory of transformation of the becomings through alterations of speed and slowness, subject as it exists in spatio-temporality. Becoming-cunt materiality, perception, corporeal orientation and desire. takes the folds and plurality of the form of the cunt as a Becoming involves the fold of form and force of subject problematic and unstable schema which challenges the and becoming term to create a unique hybrid unlike paradigms affirmed through the symbol of the phallus any other due to the unnatural nature of the relation. in dominant culture’s articulation of subjectivity as itself Becoming offers existence defined through proliferation singular, stable and essentially spatial. The schema of the and a theorisation of subjectivity upon a trajectory of con- cunt acts as a basis for the ways in which the flesh and self tinual and inevitable transformation. It resists the molar may exist differently to become otherwise. being as fixed spatially, demarcated from other beings and defined through systems of resemblance (metaphor) and relationship (metonym). Becoming dissipates the subject What is a Cunt? spatially into series of molecular configurations which constellate as a multiplicity of forces impacting and alter- That this question is impossible to answer heralds the ing each other. Modern culture comprehends the subject power of the cunt to reorient sense and substance. It is through the stratification of forms, from body to society, impossible to conceptualise ‘a’ cunt in the same way as which defines and reifies everything from one’s own flesh one can conceive of ‘a’ penis. Although the model of the to one’s social existence. Being as a body is a formalisa- cunt is theoretically and culturally used as the equiva- tion of flesh into smaller forms which have function and lent of ‘a’ cock, ‘a cock’ is a singular and hermeneutic entity when referred to in its dominant form. ‘A’ cunt is Why not ‘vagina’? The tension between the cunt as an indefinite plural, as ambiguous as ‘a few’ or ‘a lot’. Unlike insult and the vagina as the most frequently cited ‘version’ male genitalia, female genitalia have no clear demarcation of female genitalia insinuates a familiar proximity of ways between themselves and the rest of the body, and within in which the female is presented. Culture’s focus on the them self, in the same way as a penis and testicles. Two infinity of the vaginal cavity from whence life comes equiv- provisos must be introduced here however. This article ocates it with the penis, as receptacle, as purposeful in its neither advocates the supremacy of the cunt, nor of the function as reproductive and giver of male pleasure, and as female who wields it. The cunt, while not a metaphor but repudiation of the unruly multiplicity of female genitalia. a political and subjectival model, is adamantly available to While the penis signifies beyond its reproductive func- all bodies who wish to deterritorialise their traditional, and tion, the cunt is reduced to lack. The vagina literally and especially dominant, configuration. Secondly the use of actually represents a blind-spot. It is seen as empty space the word ‘cunt’ as opposed to ‘vulva’ comes as a response or aperture despite the vaginal walls being in permanent to ‘cunt’ being the limits of semiotic profanity in Western occlusion. It is invisible ‘space’, needing to be ‘filled’. The culture, where the actual signifier of non-specific female rest of the vulva is either ignored or quickened toward the genitalia is exchanged for the signifier of a repulsive or clitoris, seen as a truncated penis, despite the clitoris being offensive or, more resonant with its affinity with women, an organ purely for the experiencing of pleasure and hav- disorderly or disobedient subject, particularly male (essen- ing no other discernible function, neither in biology, anat- tially men most often call other men ‘cunts’ when they fail omy or physiology. This blind spot is explicitly revealed to fulfil an expectation). Hence the offence of cunt is in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud demarcated the social redeemed from its expropriation from female anatomy to ingraining of female ‘absence’ as an example of anatomy majoritarian insult. Majoritarian refers to adherence to being subsumed into cultural development as ‘castration’, rigid and traditional paradigms of value, power, percep- Jacques Lacan emphasised the visual aspect of this subsu- tion and force (action/will). The disobedience of the cunt mation, and Luce Irigaray elucidates the larger philosophi- is intimately related to the transgression of paradigms of cal trajectories in dominant culture that make the way we the singular, the onomastic, the visual and the functional understand genitalia as a symptom rather than the cause of which the cunt performs. The cunt can therefore offer a the blind spot. Although psychoanalysis is misunderstood becoming-minoritarian, an active repudiation of majori- as introducing, rather than simply observing, these symp- tarian systems which create and proliferate the singularity toms, it should not be underestimated as an important of majoritarianism without exchanging one paradigm for introduction to the fold of culture, anatomy and subjectiv- another. Similarly this article uses the term ‘perversion’ as ity that sees the maintenance of dominant systems as both a repudiation of the compulsory heterosexual act thought macrocosmic through larger epistemological fields, from along traditional paradigms of force and power. No act government to philosophy and science, and microcosmic is discarded, but dominant modes of thinking various in the genesis, development and continual re-enactment of acts are perverse in a subversive and hence reoriented self as inextricable social and corporeal. way. Perversion shares an intimate relation with becom- The preposition of the penis as the possibility of geni- ing-cunt, where perversion as temporal libidinal flow can talia offers alternatives as, not ‘other’ genitalia, but simply facilitate various forms of becoming-cunt. ‘no’ genitalia. That which fails to be male – the transvestite, the weak, what of a desirable becoming. Theoretically one becomes- the perverse, the feminine – is reduced to an emasculated penis, or more appropriately becomes-phallus, no less and hence signified castrated subject. Subjects which are than one becomes-cunt. The major difference is the pro- emasculated are not wounded but instead wound the sanc- liferation of infinite force found in becoming-cunt rather tity of the divine male white subject, in the same way that than the reiteration of dominant paradigms of power and the insult ‘cunt’ wounds only that which defines itself as abstract ideology in becoming-phallus. A becoming-phal- emphatically not cunt. That the male position is a single lus is no becoming at all, rather an ambition to a pinnacle, position, against which everything else falls away, means a subjugation of velocity and trajectory to arrival. Here the that we are not talking about men and women, but the phal- phallus turns away from an anatomical object and spreads lic and the cunt-ed; female, pervert, ‘everything else’. ‘It is out as a locus for all discourse. ‘Man constitutes himself rather a heterogeneous, corporeal and verbal ordeal of fun- as a gigantic memory, through the position of the central damental incompleteness: a “gaping”, “less than One”. For point, its frequency (insofar as it is necessarily reproduced the destabilised subject who comes out of that – like a cru- by each dominant point) and resonance (insofar as all of cified person opening up the stigmata of its desiring body the points tie in with it.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 97: 9) to a speech that structures only on the condition that it let Memory insinuates return and re-reification. Memorials go.’ (Kristeva: 7) Within this logic, however, we do not to greatness, from buildings to mathematics advocate the have two but a single subject position and only a failure to superiority of the singular, the visible, the knowable, the be that subject position. The penis, of course, is a phantasy ontological, the unifunctional, the static, the solid, and the of significance.

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