ABSTRACT
The afterword to the book is an open letter that reads like a shopping list, addressed to 'people with unique interests or collections' or physical characteristics of interest to the artist, ranging from unusually large genitals to the wounds of Christ. From the tale of Oedipus the people know that blindness is a metaphorical castration that denies sexual experience, in particular sexual activity that is considered illicit: Oedipus put out his own eyes after realizing that the woman he had married was his mother. As a photographer, Witkin has taken on a task much like the one that the medical and psychiatric community has assigned to itself since the nineteenth century, and with much the same meaning: the classification of the variations within sexuality and the management of individuals whose behavior is considered aberrant. Sade explores the inhuman possibilities of meat; it is a mistake to think that the substance of which his actors are made is flesh.
