[Here I apologize for taking so long between posts. If you follow me elsewhere, you might know that I am trying to retrain myself in computer science while also writing my dissertation this semester. Life has been really busy! But that’s no excuse to neglect this project. New material soon to come. For now, I wanted to test something: are people interested in short excerpts from my dissertation drafts? I’ve been working on this introduction to my second chapter the last couple weeks, and I think it came out relatively accessible and interesting, but it’s certainly more technical and niche than my other writing on this platform. Let me know if further excerpts are something people would be interested in reading? I have reams of this stuff!]
Pedagogies of the Obsessed
When we left off our history (if I may call it that) in the last chapter, the narrativization of kink desire found itself at an impasse. In the case of Heinrich von Kleist, the brief sublime eruption of desire into the text ultimately found its way back into the family form, reabsorbed, if not seamlessly or unincestuously, by the structure of the family. In the case of Emily Brontë, protosadomasochistic desires, though routed this way and that by the novel’s circuitous frame plots, were ultimately able to find fulfillment in the marriage plot, if only in an eccentric, hyperlocalized way that the novel explicitly contrasts with the forms of socialization characteristic of the metropole. Our next chapter finds kink desire at the beginnings of its more explicit narrativization, no longer confined solely to moments of eruption or paratextual framing, if not yet ready to support fully a larger narrative of the integration of desire into society. Once again, we find ourselves among texts with a strange relation to genre and the canon, fitting a little uneasily into the history of thought and form.
In this chapter, I will turn my attention to two simultaneously canonical yet underread authors in the history of German-speaking perversion. We will follow the narrative machinations of kink desire into the Galician-Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs and the early German psychiatrist-sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Venus in Furs was first published in 1870, the same year that Foucault famously (though also cheekily) identified as the year emerging German, English, and French sexology invented homosexuality. The novel is, of course, most famous for inspiring Krafft-Ebing’s use of the word Masochismus to describe a fetishism characterized by a desire for domination, humiliation, and the passive reception of pain.1 But as Deleuze notes in his own less canonical 1967 book on Sacher-Masoch, “he was…disturbed when Krafft-Ebing used his name to designate a perversion. Masoch was a famous and honored writer; in 1886 he made a triumphant journey to Paris where he was decorated and entertained by the Figaro and the Revue des Deux Mondes” (10). Although Sacher-Masoch’s literary output consistently incorporated erotic fantasy, he apparently experienced a shock of misidentification in seeing his name used in the emerging psychiatric taxonomy of “sexual psychopathies.” Indeed, as Deleuze notes, he was known rather in his day as a writer of localist genre novels about the Slavic customs in Galicia, even being described “as the Turgeniev of Little Russia” (10). His style mixes realist detail and, as Deleuze describes it, “all the forces of German Romanticism” (12). Like Kleist and Emily Brontë, the effect is difficult to place in clear period or genre demarcations. The heavy stagings of emotion, the interest in exotic locales and local details, and the mixture of essayistic philosophizing into the narrative clearly draw from the German Romantic tradition decades later, while the turn toward symbolic tableaux loosened from the strictures of plot and fixated on the opacities of sexual desire clearly presages the decadent Viennese modernism of early twentieth century literary figures like Arthur Schnitzler. As I suggested in the case of Kleist and Brontë, I will argue here that much of this uneasy relation to aesthetic-historical canonicity can be traced to Sacher-Masoch’s attempt to narrativize kink desire. In attempting to emplot a category of desire only beginning to emerge in the discourses of law, medicine, and science, Sacher-Masoch draws on eclectic narrative and prose techniques. Specifically in this chapter, I will be focusing on the uneasy marriage of the narrative techniques of the philosophical novel, in Venus in Furs’s frame story, and the pornographic novel in its descriptive tableaux. At the end of the last chapter, I introduced the concept of a “narrative pedagogy of desire” to describe how the protosadomasochistic desires of Wuthering Heights are both thematized and narrativized. I will be expanding that concept greatly in this chapter to describe how the philosophical frame and the pornographic descriptions of Venus in Furs make kink desire social, both within the events of the novel as well as among Sacher-Masoch’s enthusiastic readership (whom, in their willingness to identify themselves in and expand upon Sacher-Masoch’s erotic universe, it might even be apt to describe with the contemporary term “fanbase”).
Krafft-Ebing’s medical textbook, too, sits somewhat uneasily in the history of psychological thought about sexuality. It plays a not insignificant role in Foucault’s account of the emergence of the subject with an interiority defined by psychosexual categories. Yet it also has often been passed over as a mere stepping stone on the way to Freud’s fuller account of psychosexual life. Foucault includes Krafft-Ebing among his examples of nineteenth century scientific figures whose work “entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals” (42-43). He writes about Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries, “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. So too were all those minor perverts whom nineteenth-century psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fit them into” (43). Foucault’s language here is highly suggestive of the relationship between kink desire and sociality that I want to trace: these “fine names for heresies” are not reproductive of themselves, for they name a sexuality that is not reproductive, but they do “produce” new species, even though the inability of these desires to reproduce places them outside the social “order.” But the aspect of Krafft-Ebing’s text that I want to draw out further is Foucault’s slippage from the “new specification of individuals” to the “producing” of “more species.” From Foucault’s brief reference to Krafft-Ebing’s work, one might expect that Psychopathia Sexualis was a work of pure taxonomy, an encyclopedia of perversions with individual case studies attached to them to serve as evidence for analytical distinctions. While this does describe much of Krafft-Ebing’s text, it also has narrative elements. Krafft-Ebing himself was concerned with narratives of development just as much as a formal schema of perversions; the first section of the work, “Fragments of a Psychology of Sexual Life,” outlines both the biological development of the sex drive in the individual as well as a theory of the ways that different cultures have historically developed social structures to incorporate the sex drives of individuals.
Foucault’s language of speciation seems to suggest a strong contrast between Krafft-Ebing’s work and Freud’s — a work of psycho-biological taxonomy on the one hand and a narrative theory of psychological development on the other — but Krafft-Ebing’s text incorporates both. Revisiting the text for its narrative features reveals its own form of the narrative pedagogy of desire. As Foucault’s comparison of the medical discourses from which works like Psychopathia Sexualis emerged to Christian practices of confession suggests, Krafft-Ebing’s work not only taxonomized kink desire but also provided a narrative model for it. Krafft-Ebing claims in the original foreword to the text that he writes it strictly for a juridical and medical audience who would “make the psychopathology of sexual life into the object [Gegenstand] of a scientific [wissenschaftlichen] treatise,” and he suggests that he writes “wherever possible in terminis technicis” so that the text will not “serve as reading material for the non-professional [Unberufene, literally the ‘uncalled’ — with its echoes of religious calling]” (v, all translations mine unless otherwise noted). However, the very process of producing the text’s ever-expanding editions belied this pedagogical intention. Those meant to be the object of his study quickly learned from Krafft-Ebing’s work how to become narrating subjects of their desire. By the publication of the ninth edition, Krafft-Ebing had to include a new foreword acknowledging that many of his readers had found “elucidation and solace [Aufklärung und Trost] in the book” and had even taken it upon themselves to send letters sharing their own stories with him, which he sometimes incorporated as additional case studies in new editions. While Foucault’s model of the “specification of individuals” and the taxonomy of “species” suggests that this was a purely individualizing process, a one-on-one relation of doctor-confessor to patient-confessee, I argue that there are the contours of an emergent sexual sociality to be traced in this narrative pedagogy. Indeed, although his reading of the sexologists’s texts is somewhat flatter, Foucault is careful in other places to note the bidirectionality of power and pleasure, the ways that the exercise of power always creates its own resistance and the ways that that resistance can produce pleasure for both the confessor and the confessee. My reading of Psychopathia Sexualis’s will strive to restore this bidirectionality and sociality to the text. This chapter will look at the erotic-pedagogical dynamics of a community of individuals learning to write shared narratives of individual desire to a medical researcher. And we will place that in conversation with the philosophical-pornographic pedagogy of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, whose own work inspired a correspondence with, a marriage to, and finally a confessional memoir from a fan (Deleuze 11). And lastly we will consider how Sacher-Masoch’s literary narrative taught Krafft-Ebing, whose theory of masochism makes explicit reference to Venus in Furs, to narrate desire scientifically.
As I track this development of the narrative aesthetics of kink desire into this period, I want to also hold in view the broader historical changes that were the conditions of possibility for Sacher-Masoch to write an entire novel about a man’s sexual slavery and for Krafft-Ebing to contribute to a growing medical and scientific discourse on sexual development and “pathology.” While I am arguing for an aesthetic continuity between the works of Kleist and Brontë and those of Sacher-Masoch, there is a clear historical discontinuity in European notions of sexual desire and development. Where Wuthering Heights’s tale of sexual desire consummated in cruelty and violence baffled British reviewers in 1847 and ultimately could find narrative resolution only in a more conventional marriage, Krafft-Ebing was a celebrated author across Europe in the 1880s even though Venus in Furs sustains an entire plot on the desire of its protagonist to be sexually dominated, with only the frame story at the beginning and the end to make a socially intelligible lesson out of its kinky fantasy. The Foucault paradigm explains this change with the discursive operations of biopower. Foucault looks to state interest in managing and optimizing the sexual forces of populations as industrialization proceeded. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 traces how this optimization began at the end of the eighteenth century and accelerated throughout the nineteenth through the scientific works of the early sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, whose ideas then operated on European populations through the apparatuses of public health and the disciplinary institutions of schools, prisons, and the law.
Christopher Chitty contends that Foucault’s idiom of institutional power unnecessarily divides the history of sexual dissidence from the history of class struggle. His dissertation, published posthumously as the 2020 book Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System recasts queerness as a failure to hold the status of sexual normalcy. In a formulation that is helpful not just for accounting for the historical shifts I am tracking here, but also for understanding my category of “kink desire” and putting it into relation with Chitty’s own categories of “homosexuality” and “sodomy” under the larger banner of “queerness,” Chitty writes:
The normal will not be understood [in this book] as “normativity” — some free-floating, regulative idea, perhaps taking shape in particular institutions, according to which human activities are monitored and judged. I will instead conceive of the normal as a status, one which — given certain concrete socioeconomic conditions — accrues material advantages to those who achieve it or happen….
The “queer” can then be recast as a narrower descriptive category, signifying the lack of such status property: it captures the way in which norms of gender and sexuality get weakened, damaged, and reasserted under conditions of local and generalized social, political, and economic crisis. The queer would then imply a contradictory process in which such norms are simultaneously denatured and renaturalized. Rather than marking some utopian opening up of these logics for self-transformative play, the queer would describe forms of love and intimacy with a precarious social status outside the institutions of family, property, and couple form. (26)
Chitty takes to task the queer theorists of the 1990s for following Foucault into “bourgeois categories” by focusing on literary works describing the “subjective interiority” of “the closet,” works that he claims necessarily narrate the “experience of a privileged class of homosexuals who are overrepresented in the archive” (33). He argues that what Foucault sees as an epistemic break in the history of perversion appears as a continuity when the fixation on medical, institutional, and literary sources is put aside and we attempt to reintegrate the experiences of proletarian queers into sexual history (33-35). Chitty’s formulation offers a powerful explanatory model for why, in the later nineteenth century, the ongoing struggle over normative sexuality as class status took the particular form of the psychopathologization of certain categories of sexual desire. In his account, “Outside the privileged classes, capitalism supported these peculiar customs [“middle-class nuclear family norms”] for a brief period beginning with the sexual chaos initially unleashed by industrialization, reaching its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, and continuing until the social upheavals of the 1960s and collapse of the USSR—little more than a century” (22). In Chitty’s account, industrialization extended the possibility of “status property” in the normativity of reproductive nuclear family sexuality to the rising bourgeoisie starting with industrialization. Extending his argument, I would claim that my category of “kink desire” emerges as a pathology in the medical discourse of this period as a means of shoring up the “status property” of this particular form of reproductive heterosexual desire by creating new categories for the kinds of desire that fail to adhere to it. “The normal” gains its status through a more finely delineated definition of “the queer.” As scientific discourse and medicine gain in status in this period as a means of managing and optimizing the productivity of populations mobilized by industrialization, medical discourse becomes a particularly salient tool for the “contradictory process in which such norms are simultaneously denatured and renaturalized.”
I don’t disagree with Chitty’s account of the larger historical forces that were the condition of possibility of Sacher-Masoch’s work. However, in tracing my aesthetic continuity here, I do wish to push back on his scorn for the elevation of literary sources. This chapter attempts to demonstrate the semi-autonomy of form in the history of sexuality. As I argue in this chapter, the narrative forms of desire whose history I began to trace in the previous chapter circulated and were taken up and transformed by both the subjects and objects of those forms. Neither Foucault nor Chitty, I think, gives quite enough attention to the massive influence that particular narrative forms exercised on not just individual subjects but emerging social formations who learned to locate their desires in those forms and, in turn, produce new narratives of their desire that became the material of further narrativization. This process, I suggest, became the basis for new forms of the sociality of sexual desires outside the family form. While Chitty is right, I think, to note that larger historical continuities can be glimpsed when sexuality is viewed as a site of class struggle and status property rather than only a principle of subject formation and psychological identity that emerged only in the nineteenth century, his own focus on class struggle can obscure some of the ways in which sexual desire is shaped by and reciprocally shapes narrative forms and aesthetic experience. While it is certainly too strong an argument to claim (and I think it is somewhat of an unnuanced reading of Foucault to attribute this argument to him) that medical discourses invented these categories, this chapter will analyze a clear circulation of narrative forms — from romantic literature to medical text to letters and correspondences and memoirs — in the midst of their elaboration of new social categories and narratives of sexual desire. The sociality of sexual desire, I argue, is inextricable from the forms of these narratives; it is in the circulation of these texts’ literary, medical, legal, and autobiographical narratives that we can witness kink desire becoming social. By the end of the process of narrative circulation this chapter addresses, Wanda von Sacher Masoch, Leopold von Sacher Masoch’s second wife whom he met through a fan letter and who took on the name of his fictional dominatrix, was able to frame her own life story as follows: in a final section of her 1908 “Masochism and Masochists: Post-script to My Life’s Confessions” that is entitled “My Last Word,” she begins, “When I wrote my memoirs, I strove always to keep in mind [“stets vor Augen zu halten”] that it was my life and not that of Sacher-Masoch that I wanted to describe. I believe that I stayed true to this intention: I speak of him where he stepped into my life, and I am silent about him where he separates from that life….When I go somewhat further today, it is in the interest of the truth, which his followers [“Anhänger”] have falsified, and because I believe that doing so consummates a good story [“ich glaube, damit eine gute Handlung zu vollbringen”] (346, all translations mine). This chapter begins to lay out the textual, narrative, and aesthetic preconditions that allowed Wanda von Sacher-Masoch to write autobiographically of “masochists and masochism,” of “followers” of Sacher-Masoch, and, of course, of a “good story” about kink desire.