alien post imago

Music: Social Distortion: Mommy's Little Monster Today in the rhetoric of religion course we are discussing Whitley Strieber's Communion, a New York Time's bestseller for over twenty fives weeks back in the early eighties. As we read this novel, I am teaching a bit of Lacan on fantasy and das Ding, that the figure of the alien as a mutagenic human is that uncanny double of projection (the "stranger within," and so forth). Communion is really a love story, a object (objet?) lesson in jouissance, as a long section from the part we read for today demonstrates:

She [the alien] was undeniably appealing to me. In some sense I thought I might love this being--almost as much as I might my own anima. I bore toward her the same feelings of terror and fascination that I might toward someone I saw staring back at me from the depths of my unconscious. There was in her gaze an element that is so absolutely implacable that I had other feelings about her, too.

Clearly Strieber had been reading Jung; the alien figures of the book are textbook exemplars of the shadow. But the enjoyment of his violation--aside from the anal probe stuff--is where this gets interesting:

If I could give up my autonomy to another, I might experience not only fear but also a deep sense of rest. It would be a little like dying to really give oneself up in that way, and being with her was also a little like dying. . . . Her gaze seemed capable of entering me deeply, and it was when I had looked directly into her eyes that I felt my first taste of profound unease . . . I could actually feel the presence of that other person within me--which was disturbing as it was curiously sensual . . . . this person was looking at me--that she could apparently look into me--filled me with the deepest longing I can remember feeling . . . and with the deepest suspicion

Love hysteria, to be sure, a rape fantasy, the ecstasy of soul-mating, "father, can't you see I'm shitting?" and the repression of anality, it's all there. If you want to teach Lacanian psychoanalysis to undergraduates, I can think of no better route than the good mother/bad mother fantasies of alien abduction (e.g., Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the good mum, and Alien, the bad . . . but not Alien Resurrection, which is a reconciliation with "the alien within").

And isn't it sad, too, that what passes as "true love" in the United States requires the disfiguring of your lover into an almond-eyed sour-stirrer from Mars or Venus? The demand to "look into me" is tiresome; it's hard to keep saying and impossible to respond. Unless you are Katie Holmes and have no difficulty sleeping with an alien in the name of true love . . . .