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In this provocative retelling of the story of political corruption in the modern period, Ruth A. Miller argues that narratives of political corruption rely upon an explicitly pornographic rhetoric and have been instrumental in carving out lawless or exceptional space. Drawing upon an extensive and wide-ranging literature, she examines corruption, the erotic, and legal exceptionalism as they appear in media representations of Saddam Hussein as corrupt leader, nineteenth-century political cartoons, Pier Pasolini s film Salo, Ernst Kantorowicz s theorization of the body politic, Giorgio Agamben s analysis of biopolitics, and Achille Mbembe s discussion of the postcolony. Miller comments on both the erotic nature of the state of exception and colonial or postcolonial manifestations of it, and presents a new voice in ongoing conversations about law, violence, and sexuality in the contemporary world."
- Sales Rank: #8264793 in Books
- Published on: 2008-06-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.03" h x .86" w x 6.34" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 214 pages
Review
recommended for professionals working on issues of corruption and eroticism. CHOICE
This beautifully conceived, well-researched book provides a fresh and unique look at the timely topic of corruption. As such, it departs markedly from the current literature. It is rare that one takes a journey into not only areas previously unconsidered but also areas largely unimagined. The subfield of corruption has always struggled with basic concepts, and The Erotics of Corruption plays with that problematic in a totally different way, first by employing discourse analysis, and, second, by situating the narrative within a larger context. Scholars will greatly benefit from the book s insights and fresh perspective, and it will force them to think more critically about their own approaches. Stephen D. Morris, author of Gringolandia: Mexican Identity and Perceptions of the United States"
From the Back Cover
In this provocative retelling of the story of political corruption in the modern period, Ruth A. Miller argues that narratives of political corruption rely upon an explicitly pornographic rhetoric and have been instrumental in carving out lawless or exceptional space. Drawing upon an extensive and wide-ranging literature, she examines corruption, the erotic, and legal exceptionalism as they appear in media representations of Saddam Hussein as "corrupt leader," nineteenth-century political cartoons, Pier Pasolini's film Salo, Ernst Kantorowicz's theorization of the body politic, Giorgio Agamben's analysis of biopolitics, and Achille Mbembe's discussion of the postcolony. Miller comments on both the erotic nature of the state of exception and colonial or postcolonial manifestations of it, and presents a new voice in ongoing conversations about law, violence, and sexuality in the contemporary world.
"This beautifully conceived, well-researched book provides a fresh and unique look at the timely topic of corruption. As such, it departs markedly from the current literature. It is rare that one takes a journey into not only areas previously unconsidered but also areas largely unimagined. The subfield of corruption has always struggled with basic concepts, and The Erotics of Corruption plays with that problematic in a totally different way, first by employing discourse analysis, and, second, by situating the narrative within a larger context. Scholars will greatly benefit from the book's insights and fresh perspective, and it will force them to think more critically about their own approaches." -- Stephen D. Morris, author of Gringolandia: Mexican Identity and Perceptions of the United States
About the Author
Ruth A. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She is the author of The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective and Legislating Authority: Sin and Crime in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
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Reflections of a sick society
By smithy
The mixture of power and sex is the subject of Ruth A. Miller's The Erotics of Corruption. Miller's central thesis is that "[t]he very vocabulary of the `anti-corruption struggle' is itself pornographic--creating a space in which lawless chaos and sexual chaos are one and the same thing" (viii). The very essence of corruption, its inherent disorder, has become sexual and sexually threatening. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Linda Williams, and Michel Foucault, the argument is that the forces of rectitude and responsibility are themselves structured by the Other they would expel. This has a geopolitical aspect for whereas in Western Europe and North America news of political, bureaucratic or financial deviance is classified as a scandal, "[t]he corruption narrative in the African, Asian, or South American context is thus one in which the apparent failure of governments and functionaries to distinguish between public and private takes on far more complex connotations" (x). Miller argues that the hyperbolic rhetoric of liberalism locates "a threat originating within and exploding out of colonized areas" (x), as a threat from outside of the law, turning colonies and postcolonies into settings in which the desires of those at the imperial centre can be played out. "The corruption narrative as a modern phenomenon is thus necessarily also a colonial one, developed within imperial structures and referencing unique, post-eighteenth-century imperial truths." (x) Jungles of corruption, nepotism, and temptation--thrive in the colonies where indigenous perversion reclaims the ruins of European contact. In other words, Miller argues that the organs of the liberal state that suffer and detect corruption look to some outside to account for the internal decay.
The Erotics of Corruption opens with one of the founding moments of modern democracy: the 1793 trial of Marie Antoinette who was charged with nymphomania, paedophilia, and incest. In this spectacle lack of political legitimacy is articulated with illegitimate sexual practice. "By 1793 already, that is, the rational, progressive, liberal state was demanding an irrational, disordered, and erotic narrative of corruption to support it." (2) The metaphors of state-as-family and state-as-body are integral to this political, legal, sexual, and biological complex. But it is only in the colonized space of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 that political corruption, infantilism, and sexuality come together. British reports cast the rebels, "'tigers who have tasted human blood'", as "'children of the [Chinese] government's own raising'" (14). The claim that the poor and the weak, mostly women and children, face the true brunt of corruption can flow seamlessly into the transformation of the victim into the victimizer, sinking into promiscuity and opportunism, with no faith in justice or morality. In this cycle, compassion blossoms into blame.
Noting that confession plays a key role in both political scandals and pornographic narratives, Miller concludes that "the corruption narrative situates the corrupt state within pornographic space--rendering it indefinable except through our biological, irrational, and sexual responses to it" (25). This follows from a comparison of striptease and the public investigation of political corruption, in this case the early 1990s scandal around Bettino Craxi's administration that threatened to delegitimise Italy's political class. The performance of disclosure and concealment, transparency and obfuscation, outer and inner, the whole exhibitionist semiosis of submission and degradation, seals the affinity between the corruption and eroticism. Race also enters into this cauldron.
From the racist stereotyping of the irresponsible and inadequate poor black father in the US to the corrupt African leader, epitomised by Nigeria's Sani Abacha, the figure of the anti-social, incestuous-patrimonial African Other carries both familial and national corruption. Somali warlords join this cast of irresponsible fathers who defy rational constraint with a rapacity that is at once self-defeating and self-agrandizing. Weak and diseased bodies, dysfunctional families, and states infected with corruption are their legacy. Impotence is their potency, and the strangulatory tentacles of cannibalistic corruption inhabit an ocean of poverty and suffering. But where the pornographic and the political intersect, there too lies pleasure. See for yourself; go watch the mutilation and execution of former president of Liberia, Samuel Doe at the hands of `rebel' leader' Prince Johnson on Internet porn sites; or the execution of Saddam Hussein al-Majid, part of a long line of (duplicateable) despotic sultans, and victim of childhood humiliations turned abuser. The physicality of corrupt leaders testifies to their mundane humanity and their monstrousness since their end is of their own making. "Every element of Saddam Hussein's personality--including the rhetorical arena in which it was constructed and produced for public consumption--places him into a legally defined exceptional space." (85) Over-grown and uncanny children who foist their infantile complexes on to the nation, they are both shameful and guilty.
Remember Saddam Hussein's capture in late 2003? Oprah Winfrey told us that Saddam's favourite film is The Godfather, and Miller recalls CNN anchor man Wolf Blitzer's comment on the footage of a bearded Saddam Hussein's physical examination. In Blitzer's remarks on the sight of the tongue depressor going into Saddam's mouth Miller sees the configuration of the corrupt leader as celebrity or pornstar:
"Why should Blitzer find the tongue depressor moment so worthy of exegesis, why should the tongue depressor moment be reproduced so frequently in the weeks that followed--rivaled only by the footage of Saddam Hussein being shaved. The basic answer, clearly, is that the tongue depressor entering the leader's mouth produces the money shot in the corruption narrative. Quite literally, the orifice of the now powerless leader, surrounded--as Blitzer notes--with hair, is being penetrated with superior force. There is nothing metaphorical here [...] the triumph of the law over corruption occurs at the precise moment that liberal, rational structures penetrate open, and expose the corrupt leader's sexualized interiority." (86)
Students of Linda Williams will know that "the penetration of his orifices" (87) does not amount to a money shot. A money shot refers to ejaculation, heroic spurts, on a body, emblematically a facial, rather than penetration. The exposure of the corrupt leader's sexualized interior may be the metaphorical money shot of the politico-moral fantasia, but it is still a medical examination. The point, of course, is that this disjecta membra of the monstrously pathetic Other was televised and transmitted around the world to demonstrate the corrupt leader's debasement and necessary treatment.
The Erotics of Corruption drives on to establish linkages between narratives of corruption and narratives of totalitarianism. Whereas noncorrupt/liberal bureaucracy dehumanizes via law, corrupt/totalitarian bureaucracy dehumanizes via blood or biology:
"Unlike noncorrupt, liberal systems that brutalize and dehumanize via containment in a passport photo or a marriage license, corrupt, totalitarian systems situate the political within what Bataille has called the "obscenity" of the naked, undifferentiated body." (108)
Miller draws on the Marquis de Sade's adumbration of totalitarianism (or rather elements of Bataille and Agamben's interpretations of Sade), and Mbembe's questionable theorisation of the postcolony as a distinctive regime of violence: "the postcolony here is simultaneously disordered but overregulated, nonsensical but relentlessly logical, and above all sexual--but sexual for purely political reasons" (108). In the postcolony violence is privatized, and the state is subjected to the self-interest of those representing the general interest. Miller takes the odd insight from various theorists with no regard for the overall argument of each, and obligingly omits any critical scrutiny of the theorists she invokes. For example, the often noted limitations of Mbembe's analysis, principally his caricature of a Marxist theoretical tradition defined by economic reductionism, escapes consideration. Knowledge of the details of various arguments must stand aside for the flow of information, which comes thick and fast.
Passolini's Salo and reports of brigandage in Morocco, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Turkey and the Philippines are read in terms of the overlap between these supposedly separate realms, one that is all too often ignored by anti-corruption advocates. For the latter, to be an outlaw is to be beyond humanity, a danger to oneself and to other, and this is same whatever the context. This distinction works well for the imposition of colonial law but, Miller argues, a limit is reached when the attempt to regulate, remedy or control this lawless zone and its inhabitants contaminates the representatives of the law who themselves become lawless and inhumane in their methods. Lawless violence corrupts the civilized; lawful civilization is structured by lawless violence. Witness the revelations of the U.S. torturers of the Abu Gharaib prison, the picture of the pyramid of naked detainees, and the admission of the routine use of torture (enhanced interrogation techniques) in defence of justice. The contaminant of violence spreads--like bribery or miscegenation--and Miller concludes:
"I would also like to argue, however, that Abu Gharaib and the [new] Iraqi constitution are far more closely related than simply in their origin in colonial occupation. The two were part and parcel of an identical process, serving the same purpose, performing for the benefit of both political and consumer culture [...] in other words, the naked pyramid, in the process of removing the slightest physical or biological differentiation among individual bodies, likewise set the groundwork for the creation of an equally uniform political, legal, and "cultural" identity." (151)
In this drama the humanitarian saves the day by pointing to the inner corruption of wide-spread, officially sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists, thereby safeguarding the liberal state where such torture must not happen.
"It was the existence of the corrupt system, therefore, the delineation of exceptional space, and the physical dehumanization wrought by the torturing interrogator within this space, that made possible the noncorrupt, legally defined, political dehumanization wrought by the humanitarian legal scholar." (151-2)
Along with the humanitarian, the state (liberal or otherwise) is the culprit for it is by definition alienated from its ideal nature as a source of unity and justice. This antagonism is constitutive of how power works, spawning the obscene and tragic burlesque of contemporary history. The ground of reason is irrationality, the ground of order is disorder; corruption is the condition of possibility of noncorruption. The abyss between ought and is perpetually filled in and evacuated with the ruins of its own dreams:
"Even as the corrupt system and the totalitarian system come together in opposition to the noncorrupt and liberal system, that is in our heart of hearts what we apparently want is the former. [sic] And it is here that the role of the bandit bureaucrat, reanimated corpse, miscegenated monster, and sexually confused naked body that populate the corrupt system come together. These dehumainized "things" are not just symbolic of the horrors that happen in a system built on biology rather than law. They are concrete, they are erotic, and they are desirable even as they horrify." (153)
These stock figures "hold out the possibility of an affiliation and dehumanization [...] they embody what the law-based, noncorrupt, not totalitarian nation state is trying and failing to produce--a corrupt/noncorrupt space in which the naked pyramid and the constitution can and do perform the same task" (153).Miller's portrait of the state's complicity with what it condemns or represses recalls Lacan's portrait of the sadistic liberalism of the super-ego of the categorical imperative that takes pleasure in the duty/pain it produces. Indeed Lacan's analysis of the Law as repressed desire, and the pleasure principle and the determination of objects could have been drawn upon by Miller to think through the dynamic of (non)corruption and the twisting of inside and outside. No less relevant are Lacan's comments on the Marquis de Sade's human pyramids. Despite these omissions the weakness of Miller's argument lies elsewhere.
It is indisputable that humanitarian/liberal condemnation of abuse/exploitation must show or exhibit what it condemns in order to validate its criticism. Representation is evidentiary and always potentially voyeuristic, although the modalities of showing and exhibiting need to be distinguished. However, equating totalitarian dehumanization with representation as categorization--"noncorrupt, liberal systems that brutalize and dehumanize via containment in a passport photo or a marriage license" (108)--dissipates the criticism in hyperbole. Just as a logical relation is not the same as a causal relation, so too is sameness not identity. The essentialization of representation as dehumanizing is already stamped with the ideological complicity it would condemn, swallowing differences and distinctions.
This slippage is part of a general tendency in The Erotics of Corruption to run together of conditions of possibility and causality. That corruption is implied in the idea of noncorruption, as the irrational is implied in the idea of reason and disorder in the idea of disorder, does not mean that noncorruption produces corruption. Inverting the priority to mean that corruption produces noncorruption merely discloses the banality of its reassurance. That the spectacle of corruption and perversion reinforces and undermines the forces of anti-corruption does not mean that the desire for noncorrruption has caused the corruption. While the spectacle of corruption certainly serves to validate the legitimacy of the centre of non-corruption, it is not an effect of that centre.
In Hegelese, what is missing in this analysis is attention to the dynamic between the in itself and for itself of (non)corruption; what it is in itself and its appearance, and the intertwining of these aspects. The mediatized spectacle may be produced, and its content be determined, by that centre. But that centre is not the material cause of what is represented. Neither are the pathological interests of the state the reasons for which a thing exists, its final cause. That it appears as such is precisely the ruse of ideology, and we should resist being taken in by either the aura of power or the suspicion of powerlessness. Either path risks elevating a structural necessity into fate. Without attention to the relays and circuits of representation we risk confirming the very blindness and faith that are the object of investigation, taking appearance for actuality.
Miller is unable to draw the obvious conclusion from her catalogue of the involvement of liberal/democratic states in authoritarian scapegoating. What if, as Slavoj Zizek has suggested, authoritarian capitalism does not need democracy or social justice, does not care about individualism or respect, and cares even less about the detail of critical intellectual analysis? For the moment at least, this scene makes a space for the critical spectator. It is an amenability that should cause concern and provoke self-reflective questioning. Without this moment, critical analysis becomes curiously self-negating and merges with the moralizing discourse from which it would take its distance. The breviary of corruption provided by The Erotics of Corruption falls short of the vital critical task it sets itself.
University of Fort Hare
South Africa
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