This passage could be taken from Dahmer’s 160-page confession, or Nilsen’s 400-page autobiography—The History of a Drowning Boy. The heads found in Dahmer’s apartment, the mouths screaming perpetually in ecstatic horror; Nilsen obsessed with the mouth, with drowning, eating, and vomit. The violence of the spectacle—pornography, exhibitionism—consumed by the violence of sensation, of sex and death, of sex with death. Dahmer/Nilsen resorted to murder and necrophilia as a means of escaping their futures, alone and unloved, the invisible forces of bureaucracy and social stigma massed against them. To these necrophiles, the worst spectacle was their own inadequacy, their own loneliness, not the putrefying corpses, dismembered limbs, gaping abdomens, and boiling heads in saucepans. ‘We are not talking about studious “evil” but human inadequacy. Men will admit to potent criminality or controlling powerful “villainy” but not “inadequacy”. My crimes flowed from personal inadequacy developed over a lengthy period.’[214] ‘I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don’t know how else to put it. It didn’t satisfy me completely so maybe I was thinking another one will. Maybe this one will, and the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see.’[215]
Every piece of meat, every torso, every skull testified to their inadequacy, their loneliness. When confronted with the visibility of the dead bodies, Dahmer/Nilsen saw the reification of their own invisible compulsions; they saw the power, their triumph over inadequacy. By keeping the bodies to wash, mutilate, masturbate over, penetrate, they triumphed over loneliness, no longer having to fantasize alone over glossy pornography, having to hide the spectacle of their desires. To kill was to vanquish the invisible force, to release the compulsion, to befriend the corpse, the lover that will not leave. The corpse—hidden in the apartment/flat, refrigerator/cupboard is the invisible force of Dahmer/Nilsen’s power, their life screaming at death and their control over it. The bodies, after death, became the perfect spectacles of sensation, an organ of sex and penetration, violence and consumption. For these men, alcohol and pornography were powerful stimulants and they used both ritualistically. As did the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne who, despite making the list of candidates for the true Jack the Ripper, used Victorian pornography and the release alcohol gave him to write his masochistic and algolagniac poems but not as a stimulus to murder people.
Despite confessions of pederasty, flagellation, and zoophilia, Swinburne’s sexual fantasies—facilitated by pornography and alcohol—created bodies eroticized by and with pain, where the skin, the largest human organ, becomes deterritorialized into a region of pure sensation, of inspirational flesh, of post-conscious rapture, a body to be done with, a body subsumed into a pain/pleasure organ, not protesting, not resisting, but yielding and penetrative, bloody tears and convulsive saliva forming the necrophiliac lubricant. ‘A wave with a variable amplitude flows through the body without organs; it traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of its amplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it is a provisional organ that endures as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and which will be replaced in order to be posited elsewhere. “No organ is constant as regards either function or position… sex organs sprout everywhere… rectums open, defecate and close… the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.” In fact, the body without organs does not lack organs, it simply lacks the organism, that is, this particular organization of organs. The body without organs is thus defined by an indeterminate organ, whereas the organism is defined by determinate organs: “Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate?”’[217]
Dahmer/Nilsen turned their human victims into sexual machines, the totality of the body becoming organ for their organs. Their desire for sexual company flowed through the bodies until they were unable to leave—Dahmer/Nilsen oscillated between the need for human social contact and the desire for a passive desired machine incapable of negation, abandonment, and betrayal. The body/organ endured as long as Dahmer/Nilsen’s organs could substantiate their passage, create waves of orgasm. As the bodies decomposed so other orifices opened, so partialities became bodies, so the bodies became synecdochal, the parts standing in for the (w)hole. The parts—the organs—no longer human, no longer the organism of Homo sapiens. The body now an indeterminate sex organ—the organism eliminated—the meat left for consumption and consummation. Dahmer/Nilsen created ritualistic spaces within which to repeatedly kill the supreme being of their desires, ‘The death of the god is produced not as metaphysical alteration (concerning the common denominator of being), but the absorption of a life avid for imperative joy in the heavy animality of death. The filthy aspects of the torn-apart body guarantee the totality of disgust where life subsides.’[218]
214
Denis Nilsen to Matt Ruscoff, available here: http://russcoff.typepad.com/russcoff/2004/06/cofessions_of_a.html
215
Jeffrey Dahmer quoted in Christopher Berry-Dee,
216
Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Anactoria,’
217