sandusky: labyrinth of fourth and long

Sandusky is a kind of minotaur who sacrificed human victims. This primal, nihilistic rejection in which nearly everything is lost, shattered, despised, mocked and unrepairable. It suggests the sadism uses and abuses the body as an identification with a nightmarish dream, one drowned in a sea of delusions of the unconscious, into which it inevitably implodes and dissolves. He had to hate and defile them, to feed on them to keep it alive, until it lost all sense of direction, in a maze, a labyrinth of his own making in which he encountered his own minotaur at the center, and became a dull, brutalizing apostle feeding on itself.

Despite some boundaries and filters, he fits the pattern of the self-righteous bourgeois man, emancipated, who views himself as a pre-ordained ruler of modern society. Just a brittle veneer that tries to rationalize the addictiveness of perverse impulses; in much the same way he picked the mot vulnerable in the same manner that wealthy men are often addicted to low class prostitutes since they can satisfy any perverse impulse at a price, and do to them what they would not do with their wives. …..

Henry Fuseli. The Nightmare. 1781. Source: Wiki

…First, perversion is the result of an essential interplay between hostility and sexual desire…. Second, people with perversions feel (are made to feel) an unending sense of being dirty, sinful, secretive, abnormal and a threat to those finer, unperverse citizens who are supposed to make up the majority of society. Third, the word itself reflects the need of individuals in society to keep from recognizing their own perverse tendencies by providing scapegoats who liberate the rest of us in that they serve as the objects of our own unacceptable and projected perverse tendencies.
Robert Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, 1975

Hans Bellmer. Read More:http://www.thenewyorkoptimist.com/hansbellmer.html

In a sense, Sandusky in his own perverted way, is a similar case to  Josef Fritzl, the Austrian, who had her daughter imprisoned for twenty plus years, raped her and had children by her. They both feel they are rendering service to their victims by in a sense protecting them, in feeding their addiction they are saving them from more horrors of an outside world.Like Kafka’s Before The Law, they are free to pass, but stay frozen, paralyzed in a static condition. In both cases, people became aware that they did not really know these men;  all of a sudden they were strangers, a decent public appearance transformed into a monster. People could not believe it was the same individual that seemed to incarnate society’s better values.

—David Wojnarowicz
Untitled—

Fritzl and Sandusky both lived in a kind of private utopia, a private paradise, a private language. Perversion means “pere-version” in French, the version of the father figure, the power of patriarchy and the right to domination and pleasure.

from Slavoj Zizek. ( see link at end) …This is why it is misleading, even outright wrong, to designate Fritzl as “inhuman” – if anything, he was, to use Nietzsche’s title, “human, all too human.” No wonder Fritzl complained that his own life had been “ruined” by the discovery of his secret family. What makes his reign so chilling aspect of his reign is precisely the way his brutal is that his exercise of power and his usufruct of the daughter were not just a cold act of exploitation, but were accompanied by an ideologico-familial justification (he did what a father should do, protecting his children from drugs and other dangers of the outside world), as well as by occasional displays of compassion and human considerations (he did take the ill daughter to the hospital, etc.). These acts were not breaches of warm humanity in his armor of coldness and cruelty, but parts of the same protective attitude that made him imprison and violate his children.

Willen de Kooning. Seated Man, 1939. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/willem-de-kooning-at-moma-10-6-11_detail.asp?picnum=8

Fritzl claimed that he noted Elisabeth wanted to escape her home – she was returning home late, looking for a job, having a boyfriend, was maybe taking drugs, and he wanted to protect her from all that. The contours of the obsessional strategy are clearly recognizable here: I’ll protect her from the dangers of the outside world even if it means destroying her… According to the media, Fritzl defended himself: “If it weren’t for me, Kerstin wouldn’t be alive today. I’m no monster. I could have killed them all. Then there would have been no trace. No-one would have found me out.” The underlying premise of these defense is: as a father, he had the right to exercise total power over his children, including sexual usufruct and killing; it was his goodness that he showed some consideration and didn’t fully use his power – after all, didn’t he bring the ill (grand) daughter Kerstin to the hospital, didn’t he abstain from killing them all… And, as every psychoanalyst can confirm, we often find traces of such an attitude even in the most “normal” and caring fathers: all of a sudden, the kind father explodes into a father-Thing, convinced that his children owe him everything, their very existence, that they are absolutely indebted to him, that his power over them is limitless, that he has the right to do whatever he wants to take care of them.Read More

href="http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419">http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=419

ADDENDUM:

There is always a temptation to perverse, forbidden sexual acts. As Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), “the irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things,” can be explained by the fact that “the feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed.” Perverse impulses, by their very nature, and by the fact that they have been seriously inhibited by socialization — from weaning and toilet-training on — thus depriving one of deep pleasure, all the more so because it is instantaneous, can never be completely satisfied. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/FEATURES/kuspit/kuspit6-10-02.asp

—They are the 1916 With Hidden Noise and the 1926 Why not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? We are not here concerned with their elaborate wit — the noise-maker in Noise muffled in twine and metallically bolted out of earshot; the Sneeze birdcage filled with heavy marble “sugarcubes”, and garnished with a cuttle bone for a bird to sharpen its beak on, and a thermometer, creating a tiny captive circus of weight and the science of flight. No, the important matter in these pieces is the purposive arrangement made absolutely pure by its application to readymade elements lacking all positive or negative aesthetic qualities, emotional overtones or apparent logic. —Read More:http://www.invisiblebooks.com/Duchamp.htm

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