The copulative hermeneutics of the veil: pornographizing the truth

Abstract

This article explores Shannon Bell’s project of deploying the obscene, grotesque, and pornographic to dismantle totalitarian philosophical thought. Bell challenges the notion of ‘truth’ as a pure, noetic concept, reframing it as an authoritarian mechanism that suppresses bodily contingency and ambiguity. By reinserting corporeal excess – scatology, filth, and staged exposure – into intellectual discourse, Bell seeks to democratize philosophy and expose systematic exclusions sustaining its claims to sovereign reason. I foreground Bell’s key methodologies: parrhesia, a risky, dissenting form of truth-telling, and the ‘copulative both/and’ logic that upholds contradiction rather than resolving it. These methodologies are interrogated through the case study of ‘tent theatre’ striptease, where endless tease of exposure and prolonged veiling precludes interpretive mastery and hegemonic spectatorship, securing indeterminacy as an ethical and hermeneutic boon. Ultimately, I argue that, for Bell, the excessive, abject, pornographic body functions as a deconstructive and emancipatory force against fascistic interpretive and political imperatives.