A Negative Theology of Kayden Kross If you play with Kayden Kross, you're playing with fire. For she combines the exquisite and the hurtful in both her remarkable beauty and her frustrating personality. This uneasy duality defines what she is for others because it is above all what she experiences about herself, her body and her personality. Any contact with Kayden begins with her transcendent and lingering beauty: The knowing Dietrich smile. The pear-shaped face that, set in counterpoise to her pale green eyes, elicits the shade of a Nordic Fornarina and embodies the fantasy of a naked Madonna. The body that is slim and yet softly tactile. Still, the beauty is not forthcoming, not just because there is something cold in its statuesque repose, not just because you find that her eyes do not see the external world but look inward - but ultimately because it conveys the impression of constant recession, of always being a step away. Kayden's physical beauty is an analogue to her person. She is not sweet in the traditional sense, although her manner is anything but abrasive. She is a demure porn star, not as an assumed persona - although Adam & Eve is trying to create a role out of that paradox - but as a reality. Kayden is driven by sex, but at the same time she recoils from it. She is a dirty girl who rejects her own lust. It is trite to say that sex can be a painful pleasure, but Kayden, perhaps unconsciously, has turned this into a personal drama. Some, including perhaps herself, may believe that Kayden is a porn star for philosophical and political reasons, but communicating those reasons - to others and to herself - is subject to the same psychological push and pull. She holds out the politics enticingly, either as the politics of personal relations or politics on the grand scale of taxation and atheism. But in an instant she snaps it back. Push and pull is how Kayden approaches people, whether sex is involved or not. Kayden is a stripper and a porn star, but she abuses her fans and lectures them on cleanliness. She is a sharp and sharp-edged intellectual, but she stalls at polemic and opinion. She shies from disputation and dialectic like a show jumper before a hedge. Yet her rejection of her audience is both conceptually and emotionally dependent on reaching out to that audience. Kayden tries to touch you, sexually and emotionally, but something unknown turns the touch into a slap. Kayden accumulates passions - horses, books, pornography - like an undergraduate padding her resume. But these are passions and not mere accomplishments. Less the potency for passion and the risk of destruction, life can be very gray indeed. Kayden's sex, like her horses and her books, is a passion. But not a passion in the trivial sense of an intense interest. These are passions in that they court destruction - passion where a root sense of inexplicable suffering is not lost. And the burning involvement of sexuality announces at the very least a different - stronger and harder - definition of the accomplished young lady. Her model, whether she knows it or not, is the extraordinary Simone-Camille Sans, the cousin and sexual partner of Jean-Paul Sartre who in sexual and professional partnership with Charles Dullin made important contributions to French theatre before embracing alcoholism and insanity. As a teenager Sans devoted herself to prostitution, receiving her clients in the nude while leaning against a mantel and reading. Kayden is Sans, but in the place of insanity she practices a mysterious refusal to fortify intellectual opinion with argument. We her audience cannot resist the pull. Her beauty and prickly assertiveness give such pause that it makes the rest of this small world seem less than completely worthwhile. It induces an uncertain balance between a stimulation of the flesh and pure askesis - the pleasurable suspense felt in the contemplation of perfect but abstract form.