Transes extatiques : la pornographie cinématographique comme rituel

Pornography is a film genre that presents a set of codified and repeated gestures from film to film for the enjoyment of the viewer. This essay proposes to consider pornographic cinema as an “archaic technique of ecstasy” due to the repetition that the genre displays. On the one hand, pornographic gymnastics shares many similarities with the practices of ritual. On the other hand, the repeated narratives provide representations of ritual preparations and ritualistic spaces. The central role played by performance (physical as well as aesthetic) would allow audiovisual pornography to be seen as a form of ecstatic trance and therefore would elevate the sexual act to the rank of ritual. Thus, the representation of sexual acts may propose a new way of considering the opposition between the sacred and the profane and, more broadly, the “pornographic”.