Читать книгу In Praise of the Backside - Hans-Jürgen Döpp - Страница 3

As we fragment the body, we make its parts the subject of a fetish. Each individual part can become a focus of erotic passion, an object of fetishist adoration. On the other hand, the body as a whole is still the sum of its parts.

The Three Graces

Anonymous, Roman copy of a Greek original created during the 2nd century B. C. E. (restored in 1609)

Marble, 119 × 85 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The division of the body that we carry out here brings to mind the worship of relics. Relic worship began in the Middle Ages with the adoration of the bones of martyrs and was based on the belief that the body parts of saints possessed a special power. In this respect, each fetishist, however enlightened he pretends to be, pays homage to relic worship.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite

Anonymous, Roman copy of a Greek original from the 2nd century B. C. E. (?)

(mattress carved in 1619 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini)

Marble, 169 × 89 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

At first, this dismemberment only happened to saints, in accordance with the belief that in paradise the body will become whole again. Only later were other powerful people such as bishops and kings also unearthed after their deaths. In our cultural survey of body parts, we are particularly concerned with the history of those with “erotic significance”.

Leda and the Swan

Anonymous, 3rd century B. C. E.

Mosaic

Museum of Nicosia, Nicosia

Regardless of whether their significance is religious or erotic, they all attain the greatest importance for both the believer and the lover because of the attraction and power inherent within them. This way, fetishist heritage of older cultures survives in both the believer and the lover.

The Three Graces

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 1504–1505

Oil on wood, 17 × 17 cm

Musée Condé, Chantilly

The Pastoral Concert

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), c. 1508

Oil on canvas, 109 × 137 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Anatomical Blazons of the Female Body appeared in 1536, a newly printed, multi-volume collection of odes to each individual body part. These poems, praising parts of the female body, constituted an early form of sexual fetishism. “Never,” wrote Hartmut Böhme, “does it sing the ‘whole body,’ let alone the persona of the adored, but rather it is a rhetorical exposition of parts or elements of the body”. In these poems, head and womb represented the “central organs”. It was to be expected that representatives of the church suspected a new form of idolatry in this poetic approach and identified a sinful indecency in this depiction of female nakedness:

Hebe and Proserpina

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 1517

Sanguine and silver point, 25.7 × 16.4 cm

Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Jupiter and Io

Correggio (Antonio Allegri), c. 1530

Oil on canvas, 162 × 73.5 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This is how such condemnation is expressed in a document entitled Against the Blazoners of Body Parts, written in 1539.

The Rape of the Sabines

Giambologna (Giovanni Bologna), 1581–1583

Marble, height: 410 cm

Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signora, Florence

The poets of the Blazons were “the first fetishists in the history of literature”. “The Anatomical Blazons represented a sort of a sexual menu à la carte: from head to toe, a series of fetishist delicacies (and in the Counterblazons from head to toe a series of sensual atrocities and defacements). Such a gastrosophy of feminine flesh is only conceivable when the woman is not regarded as a person.

Venus and Mars

Palma Giovane, c. 1585–1590

Oil on canvas, 130.9 × 165.6 cm

The National Gallery, London

The fetish of the female body involves the abolition of woman as such”. From this perspective, the Blazons would be womanless.

The poetic dismemberment of the female body satisfies fetishist phallocentrism, which, as Böhme points out, also lies at the root of male aggression. Today it would be called “sexist”.

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618

Oil on canvas, 222 × 209 cm

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

“A woman is a conglomerate of sexual-rhetorical body parts, desired by men: one beholds the female body in such explicit detail that the woman herself is negated. A courtly, cultivated dismemberment of a woman is celebrated in the service of male fantasy”. Is the female body thus reduced to a plaything of lust?

Allegory of Fertility (Homage to Pomona)

Jacob Jordaens, c. 1623

Oil on canvas, 180 × 241 cm

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Böhme’s analysis echoes much of contemporary feminist critique: The corporeal should be given homage only when it is united with personality, as if the body itself was something inferior.

What Böhme refers to as “phallocentrism”, can be observed even in the context of advanced cultures: the progress of civilization has been accompanied by an ever-increasing alienation of the body – this process is repeated in each stage of history.

Venus in Front of the Mirror

Peter Paul Rubens, 1624

Oil on panel, 123 × 98 cm

Collection of the prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz

The lustful preoccupation with the body is the primary interest of a child. Children are able to experience desire in the activity of their whole body to a much greater degree than adults. In adults, this original, all-consuming childhood desire is focused in one small area – the genitals.

The Toilet of Venus

Johann Liss, c. 1627

OiI on canvas, 82 × 69 cm

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

This is how Norman O. Brown describes erotic desire in The Resurrection of the Body: “Our displaced desires point not to desire in general, but specifically to the desire for the satisfaction of life in our own body”. All morals are bodily morals. Our indestructible unconscious wishes to return to childhood.

Angelica and Medoro

Jacques Blanchard, early 1630s

Oil on canvas, 121.6 × 175.9 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This childhood fixation is rooted in the yearning for the pleasure principle, for the rediscovery of the body, which has been estranged from us by culture. “The eternal child in us is actually disappointed in the sexual act, and specifically in the tyranny of the genital phase”. It is a deeply narcissistic yearning that is expressed in the theory of Norman O. Brown.

The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus)

Diego Velázquez, 1647–1651

Oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm

The National Gallery, London

For him, psychoanalysis acts as a remedy for the disparity between body and spirit: the transformation of the man’s “I” into the bodily “I” and the resurrection of the body.

This dichotomy between body and spirit defines our culture.

The Birth of Venus

Noël-Nicolas Coypel, 1732

Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf discuss this in their study of the destiny of the body throughout history and conclude that “…the historical progress of European imprinting since the Middle Ages was made possible by the distinctively Western separation of body and spirit, and then fulfilled itself as ‘spiritualisation’ of life, as rationalising, as the devaluation of human body, that is, as dematerialisation”.

The Odalisque

François Boucher, 1735

Oil on canvas, 53.5 × 64.5 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

In the course of progress, the alienation of the body evolved into a hostile estrangement. The body with its variety of senses, passions, and desires was clamped into a rigid framework of commandments and taboos and was made into a simple “mute servant” through a series of repressive measures.

Reclining Girl

François Boucher, 1752

Oil on canvas, 59 × 73 cm

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Therefore, it needed to regain its value in an alternative way.

This estrangement consisted of a continuous process of abstraction, of the ever growing isolation of people not only from their own bodies, but also from other people’s bodies. The progress in the name of conquering nature in the past two centuries has increasingly led to the destruction of nature, and not only in the external world, but also in the inner nature of man. The power of humans over nature simultanrously influenced the power over human nature. The “love-hate relationship with the body” is the basis of what we call “culture”: “Only culture views the body as a thing that one can possess, only in the context of culture did the body first differentiate itself from the spirit – the epitome of power and authority – as an object, a dead thing, a ‘corpus.’ In man’s devaluation of his own body, nature takes vengeance on man for reducing it to the level of an object of mastery, of raw material”. (Max Horkheimer/ Th.W.Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung) Due to the demands of the intensification of work, discipline, and increased mental control, the body becomes increasingly transformed “…from an organ of desire into an organ of production”. In accordance with the principle of division of labour, industrialised societies separated work from life, learning from work, intellectual from manual work.

The Three Graces

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1797–1798

Oil on canvas, 200 × 153 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Valpinçon Bather

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1808

Oil on canvas, 146 × 97 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Gothic Bathroom

Jean-Baptiste Mallet, 1810

Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 32.5 cm

Château-Musée de Dieppe, Dieppe

La Grande Odalisque

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814

Oil on canvas, 91 × 162 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The result has turned the body into a machine.

On its own, the “freedom of sexuality” changes little in this disfigurement of the inner nature of man. “Sexuality is, at least in its modern reduction to ‘sex,’ a term too narrow to correctly describe the fullness and versatility of emotions, energies, and connections,” concludes Rudolf zur Lippe.

Illustration from Dante’s Divine Comedy, “The Thieves and the Serpents”, Inferno xxiv, 88–100

William Blake, 1824–1827

Chalk, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 37.2 × 52.7 cm

Tate Gallery, London

In the digital age, the body completely loses its substantial meaning. Volkssport and swinger clubs represent an attempt to revive the estranged body.

In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first modern philosopher of the body, that which had been despised previously was brought to the foreground.

Portrait of Carlotta Chabert (Venus playing with two doves)

Francesco Hayez, 1830

Oil on canvas, 183 × 137 cm

Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto, Trento

As he first observed, the destruction of humanity in the age of capitalism began with the destruction of the body. He praised the living body as the sole carrier of happiness, joy, and self-elevation, and heavily criticised the view of the body that was characteristic of Christian morality. Christianity taught that “all flesh is sinful,”, and while it praised work, it reduced the flesh to being the source of all evil.

The Roman Odalisque (Marietta)

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, 1843

Oil and pencil on paper, 26 × 42 cm

Petit Palais – Musée des beaux-arts de la ville de Paris, Paris

The sinful flesh had to be subjected to the ascetic spirit. Christianity was for him “the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself”.

He replied to the “despisers of the body”: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom”. Here the spirit would be inclined to interpret itself falsely, advises Nietzsche, to escape from the body and “use it as guide… Faith in the body is better manifested than faith in the spirit,” a thesis that today is being confirmed through psychosomatic research.

Reclining Female Nude

Jean-François Millet, c. 1844–1845

Oil on canvas, 33 × 41 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Nietzsche anticipates the psychoanalytical insight that everything having to do with soul and spirit is rooted in physical experience: “ ‘I’ says you, and you are proud of this word.

Woman Bitten by a Snake

Auguste Clésinger, 1847

Marble, 56 × 180 × 70 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

But the greater thing – in which you are not willing to believe – is your body with its great wisdom; it does not say ‘I,’ but does it”.

One needs to be wary of misunderstanding when interpreting Nietzsche, especially in the face of fascist ideology which justified its barbaric conception of man through references to his writings.

The Bathers

Gustave Courbet, 1853

Oil on canvas, 227 × 193 cm

Musée Fabre, Montpellier

“Today we are tired of civilisation”: fascism used this complaint voiced by Nietzsche to support naked violence. Such violence is exactly what the progress of civilisation that Nietzsche criticises was based on from the very beginning. The liberation of people is based not on an excess of reason and enlightenment, but, rather, on its shortage, bodily reason notwithstanding.