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The subject of the essays in this book is not the body as a whole, but rather its separate parts. 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 partitioning 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.

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 carved up after their deaths. In our cultural survey of body parts, we are particularly concerned with the history of those with “erotic significance.” 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 in them. This way, fetishist heritage of older cultures survives in both the believer and the lover.

Anatomical Blazons of the Female Body appeared in 1536, a newly printed, multi-volume collection of odes to each body part individually. 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.”[2] In these poems, head and womb represented the “central organs.” It was to be expected that representatives of the church scented a new form of idolatry in this poetic approach and identified a sinful indecency in this depiction of female nakedness:

This is how such condemnation is expressed in a document entitled Against the Blazoners of Body Parts, written in 1539.[3] The poets of the Blazons were “the first fetishists in the history of literature.”[4] “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. The fetish of the female body involves the abolition of woman as such.”[5] 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.”

“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.”[6] Is the female body thus reduced to a plaything of lust?

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 civilisation has been accompanied by an ever-increasing alienation of the body – this process is repeated in each stage of history.

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. This is how Norman O. Brown describes erotic desire in The Resurrection of the Body:[7] “Our displaced desires point not to desire in general, but specifically to the desire for the satisfaction of life in our own body.”[8] All morals are bodily morals. Our indestructible Unconscious wishes to return to childhood. 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 the culture. “The eternal child in us is actually disappointed in the sexual act, and specifically in the tyranny of the genital phase.”[9] It is a deeply narcissistic yearning that is expressed in the theory of Norman O. Brown. For him, psychoanalysis promises nothing less than the healing of the breech between body and spirit: the transformation of the man’s “I” into the bodily “I” and the resurrection of the body.[10]

This dichotomy between body and spirit defines our culture. 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.”[11]

2. Anonymous, 1940.

3. Intense Pleasure, 19th century. Photograph.

4. Erotic Wooden Sculpture, work of the Makombe in Tanzania.

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

This estrangement consisted of an unstoppable process of abstraction, of the ever growing estrangement 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 dominion of people over nature led at the same time to dominion 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.”[12]

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.”[13] In accordance with the principle of division of labour, industrialised societies separated work from life, learning from work, intellectual from manual work. The result has been turning the body into a machine.

On it 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.[14] In the digital age, the body completely loses its substantial meaning. Volkssport and swinger clubs represent an attempt to reanimate 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. 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,[15] and heavily criticised the view of the body characteristic of Christian morality. “All flesh is sinful,” taught Christianity, and while it praised work, it diminished the flesh to being the source of all evil. 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.”[16]

He replied to the “despisers of the body”: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”[17] 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,”[18] a thesis that today is being confirmed through psychosomatic research.

Nietzsche anticipates the psychoanalytical insight that everything having to do with soul and spirit is rooted in physical experience: “‘I’ says you, and are proud of this word. 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.”[19]

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. “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. The fascist cult of the body was only the ultimate manifestation of the process that silenced the body. Those who exalted the body in the Third Reich, “…had the same affinity with killing as the lover of nature has with hunting. They viewed the body as a movable mechanism, with the joints as hinges and the flesh as the padding of the skeleton. They related with the body and worked with their limbs as if they were already separated.”[20]

The new Man is a body-machine: his physique is mechanised, his psyche eliminated.[21] “I am not following your path, you, the despisers of the body!” was Nietzsche’s answer to such philistines. Did the “sexual revolution” liberate the body? Only to a certain degree. Indeed, what appeared to be liberation, was often nothing more than propagation of the socially mandated self-objectification and mechanisation of the genitalia. “The so-called ‘Sex Wave’ movement addresses the needs that were banned for so long from morality and from the public sphere using the technology of mechanical production and propagation, thereby degrading those needs even more.”[22] Sexuality and erotica are no longer the expression of resistance to the ongoing process of socialisation, but rather its victims.

5. Anonymous, Tit Fuck, 1850.

6. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.

7. David Greiner, Love Games I, 1917.

Meanwhile, in the private world of a fetishist, the body, with its sensuality, experiences a libidinous revaluation that potentially reimburses it for what the socialisation process has taken away. This is how Eberhard Schorsch attempted to rehabilitate perversion, which he saw as a complement to an all around curtailed sensuality: “Perversions reveal the narrowness, the one-dimensionality, the amputated desire of exclusively genital, partnership-based heterosexuality.”[23] He explains:

“Exhibitionism and voyeurism expose the restriction of sexuality produced by the introduction of intimacy and a sense of shame… Fetishism points out the narrowness of the ideology of personality and partnership as necessary for sexual fulfilment. As a result, an emotional attachment, or ‘love,’ is projected onto objects. A sadomasochistic relationship represents the possibility of unlimited, unconditional mutual love to the point of the obliteration of one’s own person, thereby showing the limits imposed by individuality in the context of accepted sexuality.”[24]

Schorsch’s rehabilitation of perversion is valid, however, only on sociologic-analytical level: “Perversions as phenomena manifest the utopia of sexual freedom, the utopia of unrestricted desire, because they expose the great limitations and narrowness of what is socially accepted as sexuality.” This sounds nice, but, on the other hand, from the subjective, psychoanalytical standpoint, perversions can be also seen as great obstacles. In any case, they illustrate the dynamism and explosive force of sexuality.

Freud considered perversions to be symptoms of neurosis, whereby that which is suppressed in neurosis is expressed “directly in resolutions and acts of fantasy.”[25] As Volkmar Sigusch summarises this thesis: “Perversion is the affirmation of normality. It is not its reversal and distortion, but its emphasis and pinnacle.”[26]

Thus, the fetish of a pervert focuses on the sensual experiences of childhood, while for a “normosexual” a vague, more or less mild fetish of certain body parts and features of the so-called sexual object would not at all be conceivable without otherwise normal sexual desire. The apparent directness with which the sexuality of a fetishist relates to things or, rather, objects, “allows a perverse act to appear as seemingly primal and vital, akin instinctive carnal desire and animalistic lust.[27] Yet, Sigusch observes the closeness of a fetishist act to poetry: “The surprise: a perverse act is comparable to poetry writing.”[28]

8. David Greiner, Love Games II, 1917.