Nora Geist's “Saintly Cadavers”: A Lacanian-Zizekian Exploration of Transgression and Ideology
Nora Geist's “Saintly Cadavers” provocatively reimagines Georges Bataille’s transgressive eroticism through a lens that satirises Catholic iconography, using explicit sexuality to destabilise the Symbolic order of religious authority. By dissecting its imagery through Lacanian psychoanalysis and Zizekian critique, the work emerges as a subversive commentary on the interplay between desire, power, and ideological fantasy.
The Phallus and the Abject Real
The Saint’s abnormally large penis operates as both literal organ and Lacanian phallus—the primordial signifier of power and lack. Its grotesque exaggeration undermines the Symbolic authority it ostensibly represents, reducing the Saint’s sanctified role to a corporeal spectacle. The shaved pubic hair, rendering his body a sanitised waxen relic, further strips naturalism, aligning him with the “incorruptible” saintly cadaver while exposing the artifice of religious iconography. Here, the phallus is desublimated, its mythic power collapsed into a ludicrous excess that mocks the Church's patriarchal scaffolding.
Disappearing Face and Fragmented Subjectivity
As the Saint’s face vanishes during the act, his identity dissolves into the anonymity of the phallic object. Lacan’s split subject-the je (l) fractured by language and desire—is laid bare: the Saint becomes a void, his symbolic role (father, leader) eclipsed by the primal immediacy of the act. His spread-eagled legs, a posture of vulnerability, invert the dignified rigidity of clerical authority, literalising the “spread” of the subject across the Real and Symbolic. For Zizek, such exposure reveals the obscene underside of power, the unspoken jouissance that sustains ideology.
Double Blowjob and the Collective Fantasy
The two nuns—The Abbess and the Countess—embodiments of chaste devotion and aristocratic decadence enact a collective fantasy that mirrors the communal rituals of faith. Their oral service inverts traditional hierarchies—submitting the Saint to passive ecstasy—while their exaggerated femininity (large breasts, icy eyes) hyperbolises the Madonna-whore dichotomy. Lacan’s objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of desire, is here made perversely tangible, the nuns’ bodies fetishised yet agentive. The scene stages a Zizekian “parallax view,” where the sacred and profane coexist in tremendous tension and anxiety, exposing the Church’s reliance on repressed eroticism to fuel its moral economy.
Cumshot as the Traumatic Real
The ejaculation, displayed then swallowed, encapsulates the Lacanian Real—an irruptive bodily truth that resists Symbolic integration. Its presentation as spectacle (the nun’s tongue cradling semen on the shaft of the Saint’s erect penis) and erasure (swallowed, vanished) mirrors the Church’s simultaneous disavowal and sublimation of desire. Zizek might frame this as the “theft of enjoyment”—the ideological myth that Others (here, the decadent photographer) hoard jouissance, which the faithful must renounce. By flaunting this “stolen” enjoyment, Geist unveils the obscene surplus at ideology’s core.
Conclusion: Incorruptible Fantasies
Geist’s hand-coloured grotesquerie, with its waxen skins and lurid hues, satirises the fetish of “incorruptibility,” replacing saintly relics with living, desiring bodies. The work, through its Lacanian dismantling of the phallus and Zizekian exposure of ideological fantasy, confronts the viewer with the Real of desire that the Church’s Symbolic order both denies and depends upon. In “Saintly Cadavers”, transgression becomes sacrament, and the clerical body—a site of abjection and ecstasy—reveals the fragile theatrics of power.