The Pleasures of' Self-Excision: Abjection and Masochism in "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí"

Abstract

This article explores the uses of subjetivity in The secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). From a poststructuralist approach to the analysis of certain significant periods in Dali's autohiography, the paper uses the concept of abjection as described in Julia Kristeva's Power of Horror, as wells as the relationship between sexuality and masochism proposed by psychoanalytic theorist Leo Bersani. The analysis of two scenes of horror and foulness in The Secret Life... shows how the narrator systematically excludes from itself certain phobic images and objects, with the purpose of negotiating and establishing a subjective identity in terms of "propriety and cleanliness" (Kristeva). These objects and images remit ultimately be related to the chora (the archaic maternal entity that the subject can neither symholize nor totaly erase). However, a close look to the play of identifications that characterises Dali's subjective position shows that abjection cannot only be explained as an attempt (as repeated as it is impossible) to establish identity in a stable and essential opposition to something that has become terrifyingly close. On the other hand, abjection represent for the subject on The Secret Life... a source of masochistic pleasure, a momentary alteration of the psychic organization that places the archaic threshold of both birth and his own death.