Imagine a photographic portrait. What is portrayed? Two subjects, looking at each other: the eyes of one through the photographic apparatus, the other's - mediated only by the air. The photograph records two people looking at each other. The photograph preserves the object of one of these and the subject of the other. The complements of these - disappear? Yes, as Barthes wrote, this photographed person is dead and is still going to die. But there is more here. He is looking at me (I am the photographer) - best if both the photographer and the photographed are dead. Then I can be both, looking at myself looking at myself. Three subjects behind one set of eyes, juggling all three, suspending all three in simulated life and simulated death.

Is this the opposite of what I find so terrifying in 'postmodernist' art? That the communicative circuit which is so dilated in the photograph of a dead person (or even one still living) is utterly destroyed here, with no creator and no recipient at all? Just the circulation of texts? The old nightmare: human creations leaving human beings behind. Cavell's idea of the film: seeing a world which does not see us. Is this what the experience of postmodernity is? Why are these images - Kabakov, Prigov, Rubenshtein, Petrushevskaia, Sorokin - so saturated with death? But it is not the death depicted in some of these which is terrifying, but some other death, one which pervades these texts and the experience of them.

The pornographic and the obscene are inalienably linked to the perverse which circumscribes the sphere of the negativity of desire. That is, what the 'I' desires is to be the desire of the 'other,' which is the desire to become an (impossible) object, the cause of desire or objet petit a. Desire, which always hinges on the destruction of the object (Hegel), finds its expression in the mutilation of the desired object or, as Lacan puts it: 'I love you, but, because, inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the objet petit a - I mutilate you.' Sacrifice is the theatre of this drama of the desire of the other. It is in ritual sacrifice that 'we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other,' which Lacan calls 'the dark God' of discourse. Thus the theatre of the pornographic - ontologically connected with Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty' - reaches its climax in sacrifice which represents, in Bataille's cosmology of the sacred, the highest expression of sovereignty, emanating from the negativity of desire.

-Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, "Vladimir Sorokin's Post-Avant-Garde Prose and Kant's Analytic of the Sublime," Poetik der Metadiskursivität: Zum postmodern Prosa-, Film- und Dramenwerk Sorokins, ed. Dagmar Burkhart (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1999), p. 29.