The year was 2008, and the post-hardcore outfit Showbread had just unleashed the double-barrelled concept album “Anorexia” & “Nervosa” into the insipid and over-saturated cesspool of “Christian rock”; a multi-million dollar market churning out music about voluntary celibacy, dying young and going to heaven. Within this fishbowl, Showbread stood out at the time as one of the few acts willing to push the narrow boundaries of the evangelical symbolic order, resulting in their 2004 album No Sir, Nihilism is Not Practical being removed from the shelves of Christian bookstores (the album was widely deemed as “satanic” for a song dedicated to the Evil Dead film franchise). Although marketed by evangelical record label Tooth & Nail as “Two Journeys Into Darkness, Two Tales of Salvation“, Christian businesses once again refused to sell Anorexia/Nervosa, deeming the albums too offensive for the sacred snake-oil market. Fourteen years later, my belief is that while evangelicals were right to be outraged at the albums, this offence was ultimately misplaced. Could it be that like the prophetic message of the Madman in Nietzsche’s own parable, the true theological offence of Anorexia/Nervosa is yet to be felt?
Theologically, philosophically, and musically, Anorexia/Nervosa marked the high-point of Showbread’s project, a success which was never repeated with their four subsequent album releases. A/N was layered like an onion, spanning a wide array of cultural and philosophical references – insights from Dante to Sylvia Plath, from the Gospel of Matthew to Bret Easton Ellis. In truth, it wasn’t really an album, but a soundtrack to two intertwined stories found in the album’s liner notes. Structured like the Parable of the Two Sons from Matthew 21, the liner notes tell two tales of desire, the stories punctuated by time stamps which corresponded with the crunching of guitars, haunting vocals, and pig squeals, sonically blending the influences of Refused, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and The Flaming Lips.
Anorexia told the story of a young woman (representing the oldest son in the parable) who out of her hatred of the world founded an orphanage for sick children, an endeavour represented in the story by a tower that she builds towards the sky. Along the way she meets a number of characters: orderlies, philanthropists, sick children, and businessmen, figures represented by a Vulture, a Pig, a swarm of flies, and a Goat who all try to mock or impede her progress.
Nervosa tells the story of her sister, who pursues the path of the second son of Matthew’s parable, a journey into “the most reckless feats of immorality”, ultimately resulting in her tragic employment at a grotesque strip-club/animal slaughterhouse. Sexually assaulted by one of the club’s patrons, she is forced to find a back-alley abortion to keep her job, a tragedy which leads to her undergoing a total breakdown. Just like Anorexia, her story details the drive toward fulfillment through digging a hole into the depths of the earth, a journey which is interrupted by similar animal figures who harass and impede her on her descent into the abyss.
Formally, the conclusion to these obscene tales remain within the safe confines of white evangelicalism – a literal deux ex machina routine which involves a little Lamb (Christ) intervening at each of their breakdowns, sacrificing himself to save them both. This act reunites the sisters, coinciding with the Lamb’s resurrection. The ending attempts to walk back an otherwise profound narrative, a complex piece of art which offers a stark criticism of both religious and secular desire. However, is this conclusion really that surprising? After all, these albums were ultimately financed by a record label intent on big record sales and propagating evangelical ideology, an ideology which front-man Joshua Porter continues to uphold to this day in spite of several minor theological deviations.
However, a much more radical (and unintentional) message of A/N is possible – one made available through a psychoanalytic interpretation. With an eye to how we experience lack, desire, and the law – by interrogating responses towards enjoyment and loss – to listen to the unconscious in art can reveal surprising things about the human condition, conclusions which even the artist may not have consciously intended. Within this framework I believe we are faced with the horror of desire and the death that it can bring.
LACK (Behold the Desiring-Machine!)
“Yeah, I Am. I am the empty empty. Yeah, I Am. I am the nothing in me.”
Nervosa – The Journey
“My will is calling out just like a sweeping plague. Swallowing the mountains and the deserts and the rain.”
Anorexia – The Goat
In the Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, lack is the central and universal dimension of human subjectivity – the oppressive sense that something from our lives is missing or that we are not whole. For Lacan, this sense of incompleteness is the price we pay for our subjectivity, claiming that the birth of the ego only occurs through traumatic loss of primordial unity we experienced with the mother – the moment when we are first able to recognize ourselves in the mirror. This lack then becomes the origin of our desire, the launching pad towards an object which promises satisfaction. However, this desire disappears as soon as we attain it, displaced eternally onto yet another object. Through this repetition, the drive is formed.
For the character of Anorexia, this lack is present in her inability to find meaning in the world, her need to escape it by building an orphanage. For Nervosa, her sense of incompleteness takes the form of a hunger for everything the world has to offer. In both cases, the sisters’ shared sense of lack becomes the spark of desire – Anorexia desires the sky, Nervosa desires the centre of the earth.
But there is something deeper at work here, for in Lacan’s analysis of Anorexia Nervosa (the eating disorder), he identifies the subject’s object of desire not as a positive object, but in the negative – as nothingness itself. Whatever the artist’s intentions here, it is not at all surprising then that the sisters each desire an impossible object. While Anorexia is driven to escape conventional desire (objects) through gnostic purification (forsaking the world for eternity) she remains caught in its web all the same, her desire compelled towards an object which is nothingness itself. In parallel fashion, Nervosa is driven toward unimaginable sensory pleasures to be found within the earth. Fantasies which do not identify an object in a positive sense. In both cases the object of desire is nothing, a nothingness which is manifest as both a tower and a tunnel to nowhere.
The Prohibition (Object Cause of Desire)
“Breaking down the walls that you leave up to keep me from eating the tree of knowledge. Suck that fruit and spit the seed. Leave behind the sad and spineless…”
Nervosa – The Journey
As the Apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, it is the law itself which leads to sin (Romans 7:7-11). For Paul, the law, sin and death all formed parts of the same structure. Interestingly, Lacan’s reading of desire and the unconscious mirrors Paul’s schema on this point: the object of desire attains its gravitational pull via the object’s cause of desire – the objet petit a. More plainly, it is the prohibition which generates the desire for transgression, that which makes an object the object of desire. The counter-intuitive nature of desire is that directly attaining our object of desire (re)produces a sense of traumatic loss and dissatisfaction. Therefore, we need a barrier to our object of desire to experience the enjoyment of its gravitational pull on us, allowing us to encircle the object without actually attaining it. This is the crucial function of the prohibition.
Like the youngest son from the biblical parable, Nervosa experiences the prohibition as the law of the Father, the kindling that ignites her journey into the sordid earth:
“My Father is ashamed of me, by his own admission. He asks me why I have to work at the 120 and why I live the way that I do. I try to tell him I am only being myself and doing the things that come naturally to me, and that it’s not my fault if those things don’t sit well with him.”
As we see here, the law functions as the spark for Nervosa’s desire, a law which is reiterated through the voice of the Lamb (the Father) and of her sister Anorexia. To these superegoic demands, Nervosa replies “I have my own life and my own problems and my own desires and it wouldn’t be fair to me.”. Their voices only invigorate her desire to burrow into the centre of the earth, and the greater the prohibition appears before her, the greater her enjoyment in transgressing it.
In contrast, Anorexia’s barrier to fulfillment appears as everything related to worldly desire, hedonism and excessive enjoyment. She sees the world as polluted by (desiring) machines. But like the neo-gnostic religious subject, this world disgusts her and she seeks to escape it. All that stands in her way is her sister Nervosa – emblematic of everything barring her from finding satisfaction, and this is the barrier that she assaults as she climbs into the sky.
The Superego (The Law within the Law)
Freud once compared the Superego to a garrison within the conquered city named Ego – a law within the Law. Where the law itself was unable to fully integrate a subject into society, the superego filled in the gap. Expanding on this, Lacan argued that the superego dipped into the Id, turning the power of the subject’s drive against themselves. What is commonly thought of as a “conscience” is thus a fragment of the subject’s ego, empowered by the drive to stand over and above the ego, tangling the subject within the demands of the social order – impossible demands which are internalized as a Voice which eternally torments the subject for being inadequate.
However, writing in the post-war era, Lacan argued that the superego’s injunction is not primarily to suppress the excesses of desire, but is really the command to Enjoy. This should not be understood as a positive shift, or as the collapse of an authoritarian agency – the word jouissance or enjoyment is used by Lacan to designate pleasure which is so excessive that it is painful, a contradiction generated between the object of desire and the prohibition itself. For Lacan, the superego’s injunction to enjoy is the command to encircle the object of desire – to never actually attain it, as attaining the object results in loss. Additionally, in this shift the superego does not relent in its production of guilt within the subject. The more that the subject attempts to Enjoy, the greater their guilt.
I’m becoming something that I need to be, to bury this ringing somewhere deep and dark inside me. And in its place I hear a whisper powerful and new, sweetly singing in my ear: “Do whatever you want to!”
The Vulture – Anorexia
This commandment is the unbearable injunction which Anorexia finds vulgar and oppressive. As Anorexia’s desire for the Sky is really the desire for nothingness, she experiences the prohibition directly as the command to Enjoy, an enjoyment fully personified by her rival Nervosa. Her sister thus becomes symbolic of the barrier to her object of desire, standing in for the cause of her desire (the prohibition). But it is not just the world (the Dirt), or Nervosa which bars the path to her fulfillment, a variety of figures play the same role – The Vulture, The Pig, the Flies, and The Goat each introduce self-doubt, greed, sickness, and accusations of narcissism. However, the more she believes that she has total agency, that she is resisting the injunction to enjoy, the greater her enjoyment in encircling her object (and the greater her guilt for this enjoyment!) As Todd McGowan writes on the eating disorder Anorexia Nervosa, “… hunger is the symptom of the affliction, and through the pathological control of this instinct, the subject experiences satisfaction”. In parallel to the neo-gnostic religious subject, resisting the injunction to enjoy (Eat!), Anorexia is paradoxically beholden to the power of the superego.
“She had begun to feel that the sky was eluding her, mercilessly lifting itself further away each time her tower gained an inch. Rather than extinguishing her determination, this only fanned the flame within Anorexia’s heart.
“The Sky has underestimated me,” she thought to herself.
“I will reach it if it costs me my entire life.”
We see here that by suppressing her hunger, she is satisfied. By building her orphanage, she proves her purity. And in the incessant drive to reach the Sky, the turmoil generated by the command to Enjoy allows her to find a sort of tranquility through hyperactivity, a feedback loop that sustains her sense of purpose even as her goal eludes her.
While it may appear that Nervosa experiences enjoyment much more directly than her sister, this is not the case. Where the prohibition (Eat! Enjoy!) for Anorexia functioned as the barrier to her object of desire, (thus sustaining her drive, her enjoyment) Nervosa locates within the No of the Father a hidden Yes, the superegoic command to experience every pleasure there is to know through the (death) drive. We get this on the first track “The Journey” with lines such as:
“Open me up just like a vacuum sucking in the dirt, put it all inside me baby. Hear, speak see and rise like leviathan armour plated, fire-breathing”.
The song is a raw cacophony of the (death) drive, but it’s erratic tempo is as unsustainable as Nervosa’s rapidly fluctuating object of desire. At the mercy of the unrestricted automation of desire which animates her, Nervosa plunges deeper and deeper into the earth, her fleeting source of enjoyment found in the fragile resistance of the prohibition as she careens down the wide road into the abyss:
“Surely there are horrible things within the earth… but if you seek I suppose you shall find,” the Vulture proposed with a sigh, looking off into the distance.
“But what are you seeking?”
“I must know,” she whispered, “I am seeking … something”
Each time Nervosa attains her object, she moves to another, resulting in lines such as “Ask me why dying feels so good”. In this we see clearly the intense pain and pleasure of jouissance, of the destruction created in the drive towards an object, followed by the traumatic confrontation with lack and the ossification of individual desires into the structure of the (death) drive.
Rupture (The Interruption of the Real)
“Now that I’m old I see the light, I see it was never there. Everything leads to nothing, nowhere, and I don’t even care.”
The Death – Anorexia
At the critical moment, there is a rupture which takes place for Anorexia/Nervosa, a moment when they are both confronted with the self-destructive nature of their desire. This rupture is much more pronounced for Anorexia:
“Anorexia had completed her tower. She set the final stones in place and slowly, purposefully, she stepped into the centre of the tower. Closing her eyes in anticipation, her frame trembling with a deep, soulful longing like never before, she lifted her face upward and breathed deep. It was finally here, finally within reach, the fulfillment, the joy of completion. For so long now she had toiled day in and day out with a fervour and determination that would now be at long last rewarded. The moment seized her, lifting her arms out to her side, waiting, every fibre of her being poised for this exact moment that she had been forever destined to reach.
And then, nothing.
Nothing came. A horrible empty nothing.
“Reaching the brink, she looked out over the edge, but where she had prepared herself to find a monstrous distance separating her from the ground, from the dirt, she found instead that her tower was nothing more than a shallow bedding of stones, mere inches above the earth.”
In Nervosa’s case, her world falls apart after she is forced to obtain a back-ally abortion after being sexually assaulted:
“I’m up on the table and I’m scared and it’s cold and I wish that I had the money for a real doctor or maybe I wish I could be a mommy, maybe that would make me happy.
But I am giving my baby the greatest gift of all something that I wish my mother would have given to me…”
Both of these crises take place to the soundtrack of “The Death”, slow grinding tracks which resemble musical renditions of a crucifixion. However, the rupture is interrupted by the figure of the Lamb who saves both sisters, sacrificing its life in the process. While this resolution to the narrative is supposed to be a happy one, some kind of redemption arc which reverses the raw hedonism and self-righteousness uncovered in the build-up, my wager is that this is a false ending cooked up by both the band and the record label to a.) produce a bleeding-edge commodity for the Christian music industry, and more importantly b.) re-establish and re-entrench the power of evangelical ideology.
While the temptation may be to read the sacrifice of the Lamb as some kind of “vanishing mediator” which allows the sisters to free themselves from the destructive elements of the (death) drive, several issues undermine this kind of sympathetic reading. The main one is the common interpretation of The Parable of the Two Sons, which A/N finds its central inspiration from. The dominant reading of this story, in which the Father and two sons are reconciled after the youngest son rebels and returns home, is obviously the interpretation repeated here by the artist, an attempt to re-assert the reign of the big Other.
In his book Mutiny, Kester Brewin puts forward a different reading: “The Parable of the Two Sons” is actually a tragedy! The youngest son attempts to rebel against the Father, but fails at this and is forced back into childish submission to the big Other. For Brewin, this was the very temptation rejected by Christ. Commenting on this interpretation Tad Delay argues, “The big Other threw the son into the world to find jouissance but promptly accepted the son back into the fold of control.” As Peter Rollins claims, this God is marketed by religion as the ultimate object of desire – the Other who appears to experience no internal gap, appearing as if to respond fully and lovingly to the subject’s lack. This attempt by the artist to return to the Father God is best seen with the double rendition of the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” at the album’s joint conclusion. This conclusion is the real cipher to interpret the artist’s conception of the death and resurrection of the Lamb: this sacrifice is nothing more than a pagan ritual which attempts to restore a sense of cosmic balance, enfolding the two sisters back within the horizon of the big Other. This is the reactionary conclusion to an otherwise incendiary narrative about the tyranny of desire and the self-destructive potential located within the death drive, a conclusion that is actually the reversal of the Gospel, a radical good news which envisions a divided Godhead, a God at war with itself as unveiled upon the cross in full cosmic horror.
“How long does it take to grow a new head and watch the old husk wither and fall? I am molting and leaving the powerless shell, a great becoming offers me her all”
The Dirt – Anorexia
“Why not look for the image of the ego in shrimp, under the pretext that both acquire a new shell after every molting?”
Jacques Lacan
“When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.
Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”
Jesus of Nazareth
However, what if the real truth to A/N is the gap between the albums? What if Anorexia/Nervosa is not really a story about two sisters, but is in fact a single woman – a divided subject? What if the unconscious truth of A/N is that the dramatic “conversion” is genuine, that some kind of passage à l’acte does take place where the subject is forced to cut ties with their old self and chart a new path in response to loss? The question then is what is the subject converting to? Safe in the arms of the Father, (the ultimate object of desire) how long until Anorexia/Nervosa are confronted again with that haunting eternal lack, a lack that cannot be filled even by God? After all, it is a mistake to underestimate the power of the (death) drive, to ignore our compulsion to return to the original wound of subjectivity, a wound rendered when we were severed from a primordial sense of wholeness with the parental figure. It is from this wound where our compulsion to repeat trauma, to self-sabotage originates.
My argument here is that A/N can be interpreted as the unconscious drive towards repetition, the story of a single (divided) subject, eternally caught up the (death) drive, who’s object of desire is structured as nothingness itself, an eternal desire immune to any and all declarations of independence by the ego. Through this lens, A/N becomes the story of a subject converting, de-converting, and converting – an ego molting after each rupture, eternally under the gaze of the big Other. In this reading, Anorexia becomes Nervosa, who eventually becomes Anorexia again, a reading that is not so difficult considering the well-known evangelical compulsion to “re-commit” one’s life to Christ at altar-call after altar-call, expecting some kind of radical transformation each time.
Perhaps then, the true offence of A/N is found in its horrifying revelation of the nature of unconscious drive and repetition, a revelation which is only revealed when the listener themselves participates in this repetition, playing the albums back-to-back-to-back. In this light, A/N is not a journey from damnation to salvation, but is rather a tragic exploration into the inner horror-show of the (human) desiring-machine.
- Enjoying What We Don’t Have – Todd McGowan
- Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? – Tad Delay
- The Idolatry of God – Peter Rollins
- God is Unconscious – Tad Delay
- Mutiny! – Kester Brewin
transfigurations 