Styles of Radical Will

by Susan Sontag

The prominent characteristics of all products of the pornographic imagination are their energy and their absolutism. The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is with the depiction of sexual “intentions” and “activities.” One could also say sexual “feelings,” except that the word seems redundant. The feelings of the personages deployed by the pornographic imagination are, at any given moment, either identical with their “behavior” or else a preparatory phase, that of “intention,” on the verge of breaking into “behavior” unless physically thwarted. Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or nonfunctioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or imagistic, which are irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably economical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation.