Auto/Biography 0967-5507 12 2 200406 Sage Publications Sage UK: London, England Book Review: Copulatory Obsession and Missionary Zeal The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Catherine Millet, 2003. London: Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77172-4 (paper), 223 pp. £6.99 ChrisShillingUniversity of Portsmouth 168 170

168 Book ReviewCopulatory Obsession and Missionary ZealThe Sexual Life of Catherine M. Catherine Millet, 2003. London: Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77172-4 (paper), 223 pp. £6.99 SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020502 ChrisShilling University of Portsmouth Some authors choose to narrate their lives on the basis of the polit- ical campaigns they have been involved with, seeking to relate priv- ate troubles to public issues, while others move to the centre of their stories career, family, or sporting and leisure interests. Catherine Millet takes a somewhat different route: while her autobiography has been interpreted as a work of `libertine philosophy', one would do it a disservice without saying that it was also, or at least as much as, a chronicle of her life as a voyage of fucking. The book is not about relationships, and nor is it about eroticism. To describe it simply in terms of sex, moreover, would be do injustice to the mech- anical, impersonal, visceral physicality that characteristically marked her encounters with individuals, with couples, with small groups, and with numerous `partners' in park benches, car parks, sports stadia, and at swingers' parties. This is a book that insists we take bodily relationships and identities into account when ana- lysing a life. The Sexual Life of Catherine M is an autobiography that recounts the seemingly countless acts of sex Catherine Millet engaged in on the basis of their relationship to `numbers', `space', `confined space' and 169 `details'. Sex is both absolutely central to the narrative and also serves at times to erase the author's cognitive identity in an inverted Cartesianism in which the flesh becomes everything. Sexual acts were Catherine M's chosen mode of being and communicating. They facili- tated an erasure of the self at times and in places that were chosen, or consented to, by Millet — this is not a tale that can be apprehended sympathetically through the interpretive frame of subjection or oppression. How to narrate such a tale poses an obvious challenge — words are so often treated as disconnected from the flesh by the aca- demic who lives predominantly in a world of Foucauldian discourse, textual analysis or cultural codes — but it is perhaps no surprise that this Parisian art critic has no need to draw on Giddensian notions of `pure relationships' (based on talk and `dialogical democracy') or on traditional feminist notions of male domination or patriarchy. Instead, Bataille serves as a more friendly resource, `a ready-made philosophy' to help describe the difficulty at orgies of distinguishing between individual bodies, the sweat and sperm `that dried along the tops of my thighs, sometimes on my breasts or my face, even in my hair', and `the pleasure of sinking into a sea of undifferentiated flesh' (pp. 52, 24, 99). It may be the fate of theory to be unable to capture a life in all its complexity, and Millet reflects that her `copulatory obsession' and `missionary zeal' derived more from a youthful playfulness than any libertine philosophy (p. 52). If the body outruns and exceeds words and theories, however, it does not necessarily make these redundant. Bataille apart, Millet also reflects on how she `grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me', that at orgies she was placed into, and extricated from, circuits of sexual organs by her male partners, and that it was not until she was 35 years old that she realized that her `own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter' (pp. 32, 200). There are glimpses of other worlds, other relationships going on in this book that we want to know more about. Perhaps there is after all a perfor- mativity on show in this book that has been captured, if only in small part, by theories of the `heterosexual matrix'. Nevertheless, Catherine Millet insists that she exercised `complete free will' in her `chosen sexual life' (p. 63). Sociology has made us aware of the vocations of politician and scientist. Here is a book that shows us how it is possible to embark upon a more immanently physical vocation. In order to understand the social contexts in which such a vocation can be chosen and pur- sued we have to look elsewhere, yet this does not downgrade the sig- nificance of Millet's autobiography. It stands as a story which 170 illustrates how it is possible to foreground the flesh in a manner, which does not make it a simple appendage of some theory or other.