Work Text:
I
The ocean washed open your grave
— Car Seat Headrest, “Beach Life-in-Death”
The chief defect of all hitherto existing Amy understandings—that of Wildbow included—has been a certain vulgarity. Of terminology, of “representation,” of spectrality. What a mistake to have ever said the Amy. In actuality, there are several inhabitants of Amy. We will focus on two here: the girl and the ghost. There is a ghost haunting Amy the girl, and it is such a fundamental haunting that the extraction of one from the other (the extraction of the ghost from the girl) may prove impossible, or at least not possible without a fairly drastic mutilation. The effect is a certain zombification of Amy—a life-in-death.
II
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public
— Walter Benjamin, “One-way Street”
What, after all, does it mean to “identify” with a character? With which Amy are we to identify? The ghost or the girl? Are there qualities that belong to both? We might say that one such universal quality is the fact of being stifled. It seems clear that all these stiflings—the author by the audience, the audience by the reality-principle, the character by taboo—are essentially libidinal in nature. Without the natural expression of the libido there is an inward-turning; the development of a bad conscience; the advent of guilt, sickness, neurosis. To speak personally, I have only “identified” with Amy at my most diseased and erotically impotent moments. It is as though we were all Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo : we dress Amy in the clothes of our former lover, in the clothes of our radically internal fantasy. We turn what is other into a further manifestation of ourselves. Such a practice, of course, destroys absolutely any possibility of real erotic connection. Amy is capable of masturbation but not of intimacy. To “identify” with her or any character is a similar sort of onanism.
III
Amy Dallon is not Caliban.
IV
As Nietzsche wrote of all hitherto philosophy, all hitherto Amy understandings are “unwitting memoirs.” They tell us more about the physiology of the writer than about Amy Herself. What is new about Amy, though, is her power to alter physiology. Anyone who attempts to analyze Amy enters into a dialogue with her. Nothing could be more harrowing. We cannot change her, cannot “read her differently,” cannot touch her, without being changed ourselves. She has the quality of a mire or a poison. She saps our creative energy. She destroys relationships, upsets homeostasis, as amoral as a virus. In this respect, we refer to the ghost and not the girl.
V
Perhaps this is the source of all the furor surrounding Amy: she forces us to confront the body in quite a discomfiting way, especially as it pertains to morality. Amy can alter thoughts, which must mean that the soul is something in the body, that thought and flesh are one and the same substance. Consequently, an eternal, transcendental categorical imperative is impossible—even if Amy herself does not believe this. So many concerns of her source material appear petty when considered in this light. Amy, like so many of her interpreters, is like a dog who has trapped herself in a cage with an open door.
VI
(A) There is indeed something a little Jewish about Amy, and indeed something a little Kafkaesque. The image of Gregor Samsa’s father pelting an apple at his vermin son contains within it the entire tragedy of Amy Dallon. (This is why it is so tempting to associate Amy with insects.) The apple is Original Sin. An alien father has imposed upon Amy both the desire and the denial thereof. She has been circumcised. In fact, she has circumcised herself, for she is after all the automutilator par excellence. This is, we might remember, Freud’s explanation for the incest taboo. She has internalized the Father, a process perhaps aided by the unfatherliness of her “real” father, Mark, who is most absent precisely when Amy is most guilty (i.e., she has internalized the paternal power, and thus made it stronger). The discovery of her other “real” father, Marquis, constitutes a more major shift than her encounter with Bonesaw: her lifelong guilt now has an outlet, someone real outside of herself, someone who can be disobeyed—someone, in fact, whose paternal power it might be moral to deny.
But a purely theological interpretation misses the point. Theology is the small ugly sister who must be kept out of sight. In reality, the apple is something that is desired, eaten, metabolized, shat out: an entirely natural, worldly, material process. The guilt is a kind of byproduct, the foam on top of the river of Amy. Amy the girl cannot recognize this. Amy the ghost succeeds in some instances but fails in others. These contradictions are Amy’s dense core, around which we revolve like dumb rocks.
(B) For Kafka, guilt is distinct from shame. Guilt is something imposed by the Law, an immutable quality that can be assigned at the will of the sovereign. Shame meanwhile is an affect, something purely internal—and for Kafka it is inexpiable. This is why Amy runs to the Birdcage, desperate for judgment. This is why she can only exit her self-imposed imprisonment on judgment day. She believes this is penance. Of course, she is mistaken. Like the son in “The Judgment,” Amy really desires her own repression—she wants to be told to drown herself, and her problem with the authority figures in her life is that they do not do just that.
VII
Mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters.
— Georges Bataille, “The Deviations of Nature”
Amy is an incongruity, a monster, an invert (both a homosexual and a kind of negative image—but is there really a difference?). There is the monstrosity of her being a young girl, of her being a lesbian, of her disrespect of the incest taboo. She is a freak. We are invited to gawk. This fact creates a couple new dialectics. If you have seen Regnault’s “Double Child” you will know what I mean. At first we are tempted to overlay Amy’s face with Victoria’s. But we must remember Victoria—perfect and beautiful—is herself a kind of composite. She is the end result of a century of overlaying superpowered nymphets atop one another—she can only create the perfect image against which to compare Amy’s radical imperfection. Instead, we must imagine Amy the ghost’s face overlaid with Amy the girl’s, each at half opacity, so a composite is created—this is what we do when we conflate the two. But really the truth—as with the montage technique in film—exists in the interstice, the juxtaposition, between the two images. The truth resides precisely in their opposition.
VIII
In sexual union with a god, the overwhelmed and happy mortal suddenly cancels the infinite distance separating him from the heavenly ones; but at the same time, this distance is re-established, though in reverse, in the animal metamorphosis of the god.
— Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose
What are we to make of the fact that Amy reconstitutes her battered and destroyed Victoria with the entrails of dogs and rats? Upon “consummating” the lust that had defined her for her entire life, Victoria ceases to be the perfect object of desire. Amy exits the cave and dislikes what she discovers outside. What is necessary, then, is to return Victoria to the point of total Otherness, to the point of pure concept, to the topos hyperuranios . She must abstract Victoria once more. (Abstract derives from the Latin abstractus, which literally means drawn, or dragged, away. When Amy drags Victoria away—or rather, forces Victoria to drag herself away—she makes literal what has been occurring in silence throughout their lives together.) This is the impetus for the wretchification: the horror of having the pornstar look back at you through the screen. Rather than an absentminded, panicked “mistake,” the mutilation is instead quite intentional: it enacts a kind of perverse justice, a reversal: she turns Victoria into the animal who longs for the perfect form of Amy, but creates in the same instance the infinite distance that once separated them, except of course this time with the opposite polarity.
So much hinges on the moment of this mutilation. It is the break Yeats writes into “Leda and the Swan”: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” The steady pentameter ruptures and expands to include the history circling the singular Event. The wretchification signals the breakage of some vast, monstrous, machinic hymen—the purity of the comic book guts and glory—and it is this blood that stains Amy’s hands.
IX
What must Amy see when she looks into someone’s guts? For her, life must lose some of its essential quality—cells, organs, DNA are for her mere instruments. The Greek philosophers, and Aristotle in particular, differentiated between bios and zoe : the latter is “animal life,” the quality of being alive, anything organic; meanwhile, the former entails human life, the life with quality, a narrative with which one could write a biography. For Amy, to conceive of bios is an impossibility. For Amy, the basic substance of life is a kind of reified meat. How could this instrumentalization not lend itself to certain solipsism, a certain— sadism?
The possibility that New Wave developed a Panacea action figure fascinates me for this very reason. In the case of the Amy Dallon Funko Pop, we return to the idea of Amy’s life-in-death. The consuming public views the officially licensed action figure with the same blind solipsistic ecstasy with which Amy views Victoria, and indeed with which we view Amy the ghost. There is a ghost inhabiting this action figure as well: the ghost of the commodity form, which is of course the ultimate process of abstraction. Here, then, at last, we have revealed the utopian potential of Amy. As the communist aims exorcize the commodity form from nature, so too must we Amy understanders aim to exorcize Amy the ghost from Any the girl, separate her life from her death. Each of us must become little Bonesaws, bearing about glinting scalpels, carving the corona pollentia out from Amy’s head, the purpose being to save her, to save ourselves. Without her shard, Amy could conceive of bios, which can also be translated as the proper form of life for any given organism. And do we not deserve this as well?
The implements for a post-Amy utopia are there, like stars sitting in the sky above us: We need only to draw the constellation.
X
Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This is a text on method.
I respect only those Amy interpretations written in blood.
There are many ways to separate Amy the ghost from Amy the girl; however, all these methods share in common the necessity for will. An interpretation of Amy makes me nauseous—what I want instead is an Amy polemic. An exorcism is inherently violent, and only a violent act can accomplish the separation of life and death. Amy interpretations are too mealy-mouthed, too half-and-half, too content. I do not respect you, you who are content with this ghost in the girl: “I have invented Amy Dallon,” you say, and blink. You are interested in revenge and debt, and I despise you so deeply precisely because I love so deeply what is best in Amy interpretation (what is best in you ), which is the freedom from such enervating moods.
I respect only those Amy interpreters who dangle above the abyss between ghost and girl, unafraid to fall into this gaping chasm, you who want to create a new Amy, who will go through the birthing pains involved with being truly creative. Amy inflicts upon us a vast and insuperable suffering, and all true suffering wants only to create. I say: Kill Amy. Kill Amy by creating a new Amy.
XI
The Amy interpreters have only analyzed her, in various ways; the point is to move the fuck on.