Erotic Fantasy , livre ebook

Author: Hans-Jürgen Döpp
Translators: Philip Jenkins, Jane Rogoyska, Dr. Jane Susanna Ennis, Susana M. Steiner

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Hans-Jürgen Döpp



Erotic Fantasy
Contents


Introduction
Love’s Body Reflections on Fragmentation of the Body
Which brings us back to the Anatomical Blazons .
The Erotic Orient
Bound Happiness Chinese Eroticism
Between the Sublime and the Grotesque Japanese Erotic Engravings
In Praise of the Backside
Our Arses Shall Be Symbols of Peace
Feet-Ishism
Sapphic Art
Sappho’s Repudiated Love
Objects of Desire
“SEE ME! - TOUCH ME!” The Eroticism of Touch
Sadomasochism
On the Ecstasies of the Whip
Ecstasy
The Kiss
Oral Pleasures
Sexology: Kisses Better Than Valium
Priapus
The Damned God
The Manipulated Breasts
The Covered Breast
The Breast in Psychoanalysis
The Liberated Breast
Index
Notes
1. Margit Gaal, 1920.


Introduction


Love’s Body Reflections on Fragmentation of the Body

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.

O Body, how graciously you let my soul
Feel the happiness, that I myself keep secret,
And while the brave tongue shies away,
From all that there is to praise, that brings me joy,
Could you, O Body, be any more powerful,
Yes, without you nothing is complete,
Even the Spirit is not tangible, it melts away
Like hazy shadows or fleeting wind. [1]

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:

“To sing of female organs,
To bring them to God’s ears,
Is madness and idolatry,
For which the earth will cry on Judgement day.”

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 , 19 th 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 objec