Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

For the femme fatale signals the eruption of a seductively excessive and dangerous pleasure. With her, the submission to sex is the submission to force because in fucking you - in the very act of fucking you - she also invariably fucks you over. What she holds out and promises as an erotically cathectable scenario is the possibility of a thrilling identification with the image of one's own death.

Precisely because she refuses "to cede her desire" and so "fully assumes the death drive" (Zizek 66), the danger she poses is one of masochistic identification to the point of a self-explosive suicide, of taking as one's own a feminine and finally "frenetic enjoyment" (Laplanche 105) whose intensities are nothing short of self-annihilatory. In desiring her, the dick desires, period: it is a pure and non-objectal desire for what he would most like to be: dead. The femme fatale provokes, that is, a wish for the pleasurable identification with a corpse. And it is exactly to protect himself (and us) against such a wish, which figures the essential coincidence of the threat of sex and the threat of violence, that the dick so completely disappears behind the "I" of his masculine consciousness. The body of the detective shows up in Chandler only in order to be feminized and ravaged, and thus it seeks to make itself localizable only in its ultimate lack of locale: in its virtual and eerie withdrawal from the spaces that its investigatory quest maps. Marlowe becomes for us an identificatory possibility just to the extent that he fully identifies with his own investigative function. He remains "ideal" - an ego ideal - exactly insofar as he remains above all a private and disembodied eye. For in this he steers us, however circuitously, toward a vanquishing of the femme fatale and the narrative pleasures of solution, away from the enjoyments of dissolution that entail becoming the femme fatale, and he thereby enables us to keep at bay the perpetually seductive image of all those beaten, bloated, penetrated, and bruised victims of an ecstatically accepted violence.