As in the case of Christie, ‘Power is essentially what dictates its law to sex.’[185] Bundy’s discourse with the machinery of power, of the law, of the symbolic name of the father, legitimized—to him—his actions. Arrested and imprisoned, he escaped with ease. Beyond the law, the power of the court, and the police, Bundy sublimated his absolute self. His desire for death, for violence, sex, and necrophilia acted as transferences between power and sex.
Foucault offers five principal features of this relationship; a closer look will provide a clue to Bundy’s necrophiliac tendencies: ‘The negative relation. It never establishes any connection between power and sex that is not negative: rejection, exclusion, refusal, blockage, concealment, or mask. Where sex and pleasure are concerned, power can “do” nothing but say no to them; what it produces, if anything, is absences and gaps; it overlooks elements, introduces discontinuities, separates what is joined, and marks off boundaries. Its effects take the general form of limit and lack.’
To expand a Lacanian pun, Bundy was always/already a sinthome[186]—an artificial self, an auto-creation. ‘It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.’[187] To extend the pun further, he embodied the ‘negative relation’—he was not brother/son, not son/grandson. He could not name himself in relation to those closest to him—sister/mother, mother/grandmother, absent father/father/grandfather. Powerless to enact his own selfhood in relation to the Other, Bundy sought power (and identity with his father/grandfather) by torturing animals (as did West, Bundy, and Dahmer). ‘There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed.’[188] Rejected by his sister/mother and mother/grandmother, Bundy sought replacements to re-enact the rejection. Coming from a less-than-privileged background, he felt excluded from the world of the university elites. Although he found sex and desire in his relationship with Stephanie Brooks, he sought power in involvement with Republican politics. When Brooks ended the relationship, Bundy refused to accept the decision and continued calling and meeting her until—with his new-found confidence and power from his lust murders—rekindled the relationship but on his terms. ‘I’m into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.’[189] He did so by use of concealment—he had already raped, sodomized, murdered and dismembered a number of women; and by masks—the ambitious law student rather than feckless dreamer. Bundy ended the relationship with a no, a negation of their relations, a negation of her name and her role as partner/wife—as sister/mother. He created a gap between them so that they could not be husband/wife, he absented himself from any normal power/sex exchange and created that dynamic within himself. The absence he created became the answer—to continually form the absence of the other (women) by using power and sex to create death, to discontinue life but to have power over it through violence and sex. He socially separated what should be joined—husband/wife—to rearticulate and then de-articulate the sister/brother, mother/son network. He transgressed boundaries that had been marked off—houses, apartments—and reticulated a new topology of desire and violence, sex and power, that would bring him to the limits of humanity, to a risk of self-destruction through his complete lack of a signifier, of his lack of being, buy his constant desire to (manqué-a-etre) want-to-be. Bundy’s fundamental fantasy was to regain what he lacked—symbolic castration by his absent (castrated) father. He refused to accept that the ultimate sexual object does not exist and looked for it in his victims, believing they embodied the lost object. Bundy wilfully pursued the Other in his attempt to fulfil his desire and fill the absences. He saw the bodies of his victims as the object-cause of his desire, he raped and sodomized them after death—like the Moche of northern Peru circa 100-800 AD—to become immortal, ‘We should not forget that the death drive is a Freudian name for immortality, for a pressure, a compulsion, which persists beyond death.’[190] For Bundy, walking through the campus of Florida State University, pressure and compulsion building, he attempted to limit his violent desires, but he could not say no to them.
He could walk the pathways of the leafy campus, check out a few classes, dream that he was back at school. He obtained food, clothes, and electronic equipment by shoplifting or with stolen credit cards. Like Christie before him and West after, Bundy was a consummate and compulsive thief, stealing as a means of going beyond the law in everyday acts, small events that tested his personal power against that of the authority. ‘Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?’[191]
On the 15th of January 1978, around 3am, Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house of Florida State University. One of the students, Nita Neary, returning after a night out and finding the door open, heard a noise that frightened her. She stepped into the shadows by the staircase and saw a man run down the stairs and into the street:
‘Secondly, power prescribes an “order” for sex that operates at the same time as a form of intelligibility: sex is to be deciphered on its relation to the law. And finally, power acts by laying down the rule: power’s hold on sex is maintained through language, or rather through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law. It speaks, and that is the rule. The pure form of power resides in the function of the legislator; and its mode of action with regard to sex is of a juridico-discursive character.’[192]
Bundy spent his childhood in an illicit relationship with his sister/mother, permitted to have sibling feelings but forbidden to have filial attachments. The binary system of mother/son sister/brother confused, unintelligible to the boy, the ‘order’ of familial power reversed, negated into dual dynamics of sex and loss, love and absence. The rule of law—the mother’s and the father’s—denied, deflected, withdrawn, transferred—could never implant, the discourse changing constantly. Bundy discovered who he was not at the same time as he found a means of being whole—of possessing discourse—the time he began kidnapping and murdering women in 1961. To regain power (and therefore to have some control over his sex life), he enrolled in law school, joined the Republican Party, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, taking on the role of a would-be legislator, a successful lawyer practising juridical discourse.
Nita Neary ran to her room and told Nancy her roommate what she had seen—a man wearing a dark cap carrying what looked like a log wrapped in a blanket. Before they could raise the alarm, they saw one of their friends—Karen Chandler—covered in blood. Nita rushed to the housemother’s room and they started to check the rooms. Bundy had bludgeoned Karen Chandler (21) as she slept, breaking her jaw, smashing teeth, injuring her hands, and causing concussion. ‘The cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not go near, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and secrecy. To deal with sex, power employs nothing more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that sex renounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of punishment that is nothing other than the suppression of sex. Renounce your self or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not appear if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be maintained only at the cost of your nullification. Power constrains sex only through a taboo that plays on the alterative between two nonexistences.’[193]
186
Dylan Evans,