Issei stretches out Renée’s corpse, tries to bite her, but the skin is too resilient. With a kitchen knife, he cuts into “the parts he likes best”––buttocks, thighs––and sets about to eat a few raw morsels. Then he digs into breasts, lips, nose, genitals, calf muscles, all of which he eats, either raw or cooked in a skillet and seasoned with salt, pepper, and mustard. “While I was eating, I concentrated very hard on her, I tried to match her images to the pieces of meat. And it all tasted good to me because it was her.” “So as not to forget,” he took about thirty color Polaroids of the slicing process and of the meal, playing the tape of her reading the poems over and over again “instead of music.”

The amorous repast was to last two days. Then Issei proceeded to cut up the rest of Renée with a hatchet and an electric knife, throw out her clothes, personal effects, and entrails in various garbage cans, pack the mutilated body into two valises, call a cab, and head for the park.

Professing undying love, Issei Sagawa lay down on a bench and fell asleep.

Playboy pictures
Are you attracted to them?

Yes, but not because of the look of seduction. There isn’t even a look. Looking requires that an object conceal and reveal itself, that an object suggest its own disappearance at any given moment, which is why the act of looking contains a kind of oscillating motion. This naked body does not play hide and seek; like any ordinary object, it is there to begin with. It is very simply there, without any spark of potential absence, in that state of radical disillusion which is pure presence. And even this has nothing to do with presence, since real presence implies absence. All the eye beholds here is a piece of ass, which has nothing to do with the formation on an image.

But how is this not an image? Why is this a matter of a piece of ass and not of the image of a piece of ass?

It is different from a work in which certain parts are visible while others are not, in which the visible parts render the others invisible: in which a kind of rhythm of emergence and secrecy sets in, a flotation line between the imaginary and the ostensible. Here everything has equal visibility, everything shares the same space without depth.

But what then is the fascination of these pictures?

It is their disembodiment, it is the esthetic of disembodiment that Octavio Paz speaks of. Their fascination is perhaps nothing but the disembodied passion of a look without an image. For a long time now our mediated spectacles have been crossing the border into the realm of stupefaction. This stupefaction is what is obscene, it is the glazed extreme of the body, the glazed extreme of sex, it is an empty scene where nothing happens and yet one that fills the viewfinder. It might as easily be the stage for information, or for politics, as for sex! Nothing happens and yet we are saturated with it.

One could say about obscenity what Brecht said about order and disorder. Disorder is when objects are not in their designated places. Order is when in the designated place there is nothing (or else too much, infinitely too much!). The designated place is still there, but things aren’t any more. The scene is empty.

Do we not desire this fascination?

I don’t know; there is perhaps some general aspiration, some sort of collective vertigo of neutralization, a forward escape into the obscenity of pure and empty form, unintelligible form, wherein the visible is both lessened and degraded. How is one to know? Obscenity and the indifference that characterizes it can become escapist values––one can in fact take note elsewhere of the formation of new rituals that are rituals of transparency.

To resume once again, the fascination of the pictures is the fascination of being seduced by a dead object, it is the magic of disappearance, and this particular magic can be found just as easily in pornographic images as in Modern art, where the prevailing obsession has been to literally not be viewable, to defy any and all possibilities of visual seduction.

Our obscenity, our pornography does not stem from sexual lust, it stems from this paralyzed frenzy of the image. In discussing sex no one can say whether it has been liberated or not, whether it is being consummated more often now or not, whether the gross national sexual product has increased or not. One can, however, say that solicitation and greed have created out of it disproportionately inflated images. These have become our real sex objects, the objects of our desire, and it is this substitution, this confusion (between desire and its materialized equivalent in images, not only sexual desire, but cognitive desire and its materialized equivalent in “information,” the desire to dream and its materialized equivalent in all the Disneylands of the worlds, the desire for space and its materialized equivalent in the programmed movement of “two-weeks’ paid vacation,” the desire for recreation and its programmed equivalent in home video equipment, etc.) that gives rise to the obscenity in our culture.