‘The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of facialization. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and making it resemble a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all of the decoded parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation, but there are new coordinates.’[45] Hans Bellmer meets J.G. Ballard meets Sergeant Bertrand in a re-assembled body that resembles the human but is a fetishization of the anthropomorphic, a metonymous construction of the living dead.
Did Sergeant Bertrand’s mother die when he was a young child and her inanimate body become phenomena replacing the primary object? Was he exposed to her body, the dead body becoming the object, the fetish of his awakening sexuality? A mourning room filled with aunts, fussing around the body, powdering its face, making it beautiful? But not all who see dead mothers turn into Norman Bates, turn into Sergeant Bertrand. One could argue that the dead body, the object of the necrophile’s sexual obsession, is an inanimate, nonliving possession, used to achieve sexual fulfilment, no different from a shoe. Why, then, is the event of necrophilia so abhorrent and how did the good soldier Bertrand become the precursor of those twentieth-century ghouls Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer? ‘This is why Oedipus gathers up everything, everything is found again in Oedipus, which is indeed the result of universal history, but in the singular sense in which capital is already the result. Fetishes, idols, images, and simulacra—here we have the whole series: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, then everything is recapitulated in the images of capitalism, which shapes and reduces them to Oedipal simulacrum.’[46]
Is necrophilia a fetish? Or is it a mania? What is it that drives a man to violate a dead body in order to achieve (for him) the ultimate orgasm? Is it any more shocking than other forms of paraphilia? In Necrophilia: Forensic and Medico-Legal Aspects, Anil Aggrawal calls for a new classification of necrophilia, critiquing previous classifications and setting out ten separate classes of necrophiliac behaviour. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing classified necrophiles in two categories—ones who used corpses for sexual purposes—so passive necrophiles, and active necrophiles who killed out of desire for sex with a dead body and mutilated them in the process. Erich Wulffen added a further category in 1910, in addition to lust murder (necrosadism), and having sex with an already dead body (necrostuprum), he added necrophagy involving consumption of dead flesh. In 1931, Ernest Jones argued that passive necrophilia—sex with an already dead body—fell into two categories: sex with a loved one (partner, relative) and sex with a non-loved one’s corpse—both involving extreme forms of masochism and sadism. Magnus Hirschfield claimed something similar to Krafft-Ebing, stating that necrophiles either sexually abused corpses or that they murdered in order to destroy the person and then further humiliate the body through sex. Thirty years later, J. Rosman and P. Resnick Rosman concluded that necrophiles fell into two groups—genuine necrophiles and pseudonecrophiles. Genuine necrophiles are sexually attracted to corpses and include the three subgroups of necrophiliac homicides, regular necrophiles who use bodies for sex, and a group who use necrophiliac fantasy as a sexual release without having contact with an actual corpse. Aggrawal suggest an extension of these classifications due to the increase in information on necrophiles.[47]
Class I—‘role players,’ such as the Austrian incestuous rapist Josef Fritzl, who do not desire sex with a corpse but prefer their sexual partner (however coerced) to be utterly passive, feigning death. Class II—‘romantic necrophiles’ who keep a body or body part of a loved one in order to continue having sex with their partner. Class III—‘necrophiliac fantasizers’—those who create sexual fantasies involving a corpse, masturbate in cemeteries, etc. Class IV—‘tactile necrophiles’ who like to touch corpses and masturbate over them. ‘Fetishistic necrophiles’ make up Class V—use body parts as sexual fetishes. Class VI involves ‘necro-mutilomaniacs’ who achieve sexual orgasm through mutilation of corpses—Sergeant Bertrand was a necromutilomaniac. Morturay attendants, gravediggers, medical workers and alike fall into Class VII—‘Opportunistic necrophiles’—those who have sex with living partners but when able will take the opportunity to fuck dead bodies. Class VIII—‘regular necrophiles’ who have sex with dead bodies, haunters of graveyards, morgues, these ‘regular necrophiles’ are able to have sex with the living and will not kill to satiate their lust; that falls to those in Class IX, the ‘homicidal necrophiles’ who murder and mutilate in order to have sex with a dead body or as a means of controlling that body (see Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen) but can also have sex with a living person. Finally, Class X necrophiles who can only be sexually stimulated by having intercourse (orally, anally, vaginally, or in any created orifice) with a dead body.
Although there are crossovers and anomalies in Aggrawal’s studies, this new classification extends Krafft-Ebing’s basic dual categorization and provides a basis for an investigation into the different forms of necrophilia. Aggrawal’s legal and medical research also looks into the aetiology and epidemiology of necrophilia, which complements the categories and sexual studies.[48]
47
See: Anil Aggrawal,