Fantastic Metropolis

For those with an interest in the history of sexuality who are able to bracket gynephobia in the same vein as that found in Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, I recommend the newly translated La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick by Antonio Vignali (Routledge, 2003). This edition comes with an excellent scholarly essay by Ian Frederick Moulton. This sixteenth-century dialogue, was written in Siena around 1525, circulated in manuscript among a small group of humanist aristocrats until someone published it without the permission of its author. The author was then forced into permanent exile. La Cazzaria is unusual in celebrating anal sex; and it is unique in exploiting the metaphor of the sovereign body to satirize the dire political situation then prevailing in Siena through tales in which personified “Cocks,” “Cunts,” “Asses” and “Balls” are at war with one another (each representing a major faction in Siena’s civil strife). The text explicitly mocks medieval scholasticism by dividing the dialogue into a series of questiones, which are noted prominently in the margins. A few examples will suffice to give a sense of the text’s flavor: “Why, as Soon as Man Has Shit, He Looks at the Turd”; “Why People Who Can’t Take It Up the Ass Are Called Uptight”; “Why Jerking Off Was Invented.” As Moulton points out in his introduction, thanks to the Counter-Reformation, such a work would have been unthinkable only fifty years later.

Every now and then I have the pleasure of reading an argument I find admirable or even fascinating but implausible. This might happen with a creative, well-constructed conspiracy theory, a piece of imaginative political analysis, a psychobiography, or literary criticism where a fundamental premise or assumption is in error but the thinking otherwise brilliant. And so I found with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, which Zone Books has published with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs in a single volume titled Masochism (1999). After reading Venus in Furs and other novels by Sacher-Masoch, Delueze observed a set of points marking significant differences between the eroticism in the novels of Sade and those of Sacher-Masoch. The most important of these differences is that the desires that each oeuvre expresses are not complementary. Sade’s sadists and Sacher-Masoch’s masochists, in other words, would never find sex with one another in the least bit satisfying. Deleuze does not explain why he takes Sacher-Masoch’s novels as depicting the definitive, Platonic form of erotic masochism and Sade’s novels as depicting the definitive, Platonic form of erotic sadism. He reads the novels of both men not as works of fantastic literature but anthropological studies of existing sexual practices—and also as accurately portraying psychological formations that can be scientifically explained by psychoanalytic theory. What Deleuze has to say about the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch is both fascinating and insightful. But since very few novels of either masochistic or sadistic eroticism by other authors—and, perhaps more importantly, very few reports of actual practices of sadomasochism—conform to Deleuze’s schematic deductions, I must conclude that Sacher-Masoch and Sade’s fantasies can be taken as templates only with a great deal of qualification and careful consideration of the difference between fantasies written to get their authors and readers off and actual erotic practice. Perhaps the most interesting point Deleuze makes is that both Sade and Sacher-Masoch are essentially masturbators assisted in their fantasies by a partner who takes no pleasure from the congress. For all those whom Deleuze considers true sadists and masochists, then, sexual partners must be paid or involuntary participants with no erotic interest in the encounter; given that few women ever purchase sexual services, one would almost have to conclude, then, that few women ever experience either sadistic or masochistic eroticism: a conclusion I just can’t wrap my head around. Anyone interested in pornography in general or deviant sexuality in particular will find Coldness and Cruelty thought-provoking. After reading it I furiously jotted notes for exploring the many ideas it stimulated and wished I had the time to pursue some of the questions it raised—for instance, whether all erotic fictions involving elements of either sadism or masochism are (unconsciously, perhaps) read from either a sadistic or a masochistic perspective, rather than for the sadomasochistic perspective characterized by the “a child is being beaten” fantasy Freud elaborated. Would one characterize The Story of O, for example, as serving (or even exemplifying) a masochistic eroticism, or a sadistic eroticism? And what, exactly, do fantasies written in established narrative forms have to do with real-life sexual practices? The questions Deleuze’s book raises are more likely to be found in a consideration of the relation between fiction and reality than in essentialist delineations of particular sexual formations.

Deleuze’s book of interviews, Negotiations (Columbia University Press, 1995), which I also read this year, complements Shaviro’s Connections. The interviews here cover some (but by no means all) of the areas of Deleuze’s work. In admiring Foucault, Deleuze says “Foucault, unlike the linguists, thought that even language was a highly unstable system. A thought’s logic is like a wind blowing us on, a series of gusts and jolts. You think you’ve got to port, but then find yourself thrown back out onto the open sea, as Leibniz put it. That’s particularly true in Foucault’s case. His thought’s constantly developing new dimensions that are never contained in what came before. So what is it that drives him to launch off in some direction, to trace out some—always unexpected—path? Any great thinker goes through crises; they set the rhythm of his thought.” (94)