What is pornography? What distinguishes it from eroticism? In asking these questions, Michela Marzano has no intention of moralizing, or deciding what is good and what evil, but aims instead at drawing attention to the ethical stakes underlying representations of the human body and sexuality. And they are not negligible. Indeed, the fundamental distinction depends on the place of and respect for the subject. While they are central to eroticism, which displays the mystery of a being’s encounter with the other, without pretending to give a full picture, they are bound to disappear in pornography, which retains nothing more than a dismembered body to put on full display. Desire gives in to consumerism. Freedom to enslavement. Imagination to voyeurism. In the end, it is the human in man that is threatened.
To support her theory, Michela Marzano straightforwardly analyzes works that have punctuated the debate about the distinction between eroticism and pornography, from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Virginie Despentes’s Baise-moi, via Nagisa Oshima’s Empire of the Senses and Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O. She demonstrates how recent evolutions in pornographic representations have only gone further into the violence done to the human. She casts doubt onto the idea that the very use of the pornographic register can be liberating, particularly for women. Lastly, she queries the ambiguity of the relationship that adolescents entertain with pornographic images to which they have such easy access in this day and age.