Discipline and Anarchy: Disrupted Codes in Kathy Acker's Empire ofthe Senseless

Abstract

Kathy Acker’s novel, Empire of the Senseless (1988), investigates the relationship of discipline and anarchy in a postmodern Paris that has fallen to Algerian terrorists and libertine pirates. The competing principles of pain and pleasure, intentionality and impulse, control and freedom are inextricably linked in the novel. Acker’s writing articulates a treatise of anarchism: she plunders the cultural storehouse of Western literature, liberating the classics through plagiarism; she violates every known taboo, revels in obscenity, smashes genre rules, and commits violence on her characters that would make the Marquis de Sade blanch. But like Sade, she displays a penchant for discipline as control as well as punishment. She envisions her novel as a three-part structure with a rather deliberate progression of effects: the deconstruction of the patriarchal order, the liberation that follows from an end to repression and inhibition, and the formation of a new society on the very ground of transgression. Anarchism eventually runs its course without resistance, entropically feeding on the fuel of stale and repressive social order until it is exhausted. And discipline carried to any restrictive extreme at last inspires revolt.