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Creepy
=Creepy=
How, then, does ugly relate to subjectivity? Is a subject—which is exces­ sive exces­sive in its very notion—simply ugly, an outgrowth disturbing the harmony of the world, opening up a gap in its very heart? One has to draw a clear distinction here: ''ugly ''is ultimately the inside of a living object (like the depth of Irma's throat from Freud's dream about Irma's injection), while the inside of a subject is ''creepy''. As Adam Kotsko has shown in ''Creepiness, ''creepy is today's name for the Freudian uncanny, for the uncanny core of a ''neighbor''; every neighbor is ultimately creepy, which is why the title of the book's last subchapter is quite appropriately "The Creepiness of All Flesh."12 What makes a neighbor creepy is not his weird acts but the im­ penetrability im­penetrability of the desire that sustains these acts. For example, it is not primarily the content of Marquis de Sade's writings that is creepy (their content is rather dull and repetitive); it is the question, why is he doing it? everything Everything in Sade is a sadist perversion, everything except his writ­ing, the act of doing it, which cannot be accounted for as a perversion. So the question is: what does a creepy neighbor want? What does he get out of it? An experience, an encounter, gets creepy when we all of a sudden suspect that he is not doing it for the obvious reason one does what he is doing:
In the case of a sleazy guy who insists on propositioning every woman he meets, the element of enigma may seem to be missing insofar as he clearly wants sex. And yet it seems strange that simply wanting sex would be creepy, because a man who politely asks a woman on a date and then accepts the answer is, all things being equal, not being creepy. What makes the sleazy guy creepy, then, is not that he is simply asking too many women out, but that his constant failure seems to indicate that he ''doesn't'' ''care ''that his methods are ineffective. It's as though he's directly "getting off" on the very act of approaching women, with no regard for the ostensible goal of sleeping with them. When we recognize this, we can't help but ask, "What is he ''getting ''out of this?" even the most seemingly obvious creepy desire turns out to be enigmatic on closer examination. [''C,'' pp. 11–12]
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