Ballard’s scientific pornography transfers our “intra-corporality” to the quantitative outer realm:

The Sex Kit. ‘In a sense,’ Dr Nathan explained to Koester, ‘one may regard this as a kit, which Talbert has devised, entitled “Karen Novotny”—it might even be feasible to market it commercially. It contains the following items: (1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, left nipple marked by a small ulcer, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations—the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm…¹

This transfer is equivalent to the exteriorization of the interior and interiorization of the exterior that characterizes psychosis (4.1, 4.2). Regarding his main character, Ballard says: “the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on a perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass.” Psychosis’ transference between interiority and exteriority recalls the inclusion in exclusion and exclusion in inclusion which, according to Agamben, shapes up law (0.10). Is sovereignty and its terrible places a pathological configuration stemming from a faulty division between the self and the world? Or is it rather an excrescence from the underworld that seeps into the polis like a daemonic presence? (0.11)

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1. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 92. ↩︎