Naked Eternity 

1. When someone dies, it’s a field day for those who want to learn how to celebrate the most fundamental difference: the difference between life and death. The latter can be as glamorous as the former. Sad in content, funerals are celebratory in form—kitschy and “educational” as far as the semiology of mass spectacles is concerned. They are distinguished from other events by the way in which they relate to surplus ­symbolization. The reality principle loses its dominance while the pleasure principle ­conversely gains more weight as we mournfully celebrate our ability to find refuge in melancholia, much like Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. While looking at Marcel Broodthaers’s Neuf pots (1966) alternative titles come to mind—such as “dental nudity,” “tooth striptease,” etc. In the United States (and in many countries), the smile is a social code, an essential attribute of buying and selling: a smile is expected from sellers of corporate stocks, from sellers of politics and sellers of love. But what is a smile if not an exposure of our bone structure, or, more ­particularly, of our skull, of which teeth are a part? I am referring to the partial ­display of the skeleton—partial because a complete exhibition is postponed until we die. Despite being a manifestation of the dead in the living, a smile is nonetheless considered to be a sign of good manners and a cheerful mood. Yet the sight of human bones dug up from grave delights no one. The same is true of open bone fractures, which cannot be viewed without a shudder. Apparently, the joy we feel at the sight of an open (smiling) mouth as well as our readiness to smile are nothing less than a ­celebration of death. Death, “exemplified” by two glamorous ­skeletons which one could dub “naked eternity,” is featured in Damien Hirst’s End Game (2004).

While Sherrie Levine’s Skull (2001) is rife with similar interpretations, it also yields to an analogy with King Midas, doomed to turn everything he touched (including his skull) into gold. But is it not the same touch—the touch of Goldfinger—that turns “autonomous” art into a product of the culture industry? And doesn’t this gilded skull metaphor bear traces of what psychoanalysts call “anal eroticism” or “the anal stage” (which is comparable to the primary accumulation stage in economics)? Detectable in early childhood, the infant’s passion to retain faeces in order to receive greater pleasure at the moment of defecation turns, in the adult whose anal eroticism is displaced into the unconscious, into the passion to retain and accumulate gold (money), which resembles faeces.¹ 1 - In this context, Lenin’s promise of a golden toilet on which everyone was going to sit in the future confirms the anal nature of a number of social utopias.  That is how some people become bankers and coin collectors. Intellectuals are knowledge collectors; instead of collecting precious metals, they collect precious thoughts. For them, anal pleasures are extended to names and titles printed on the cover of books. This twist of the Symbolic function partially explains why we constantly make references to “paradigmatic individuals,” thereby eroticizing and fetishizing them.