Enigmas of Identity by Brooks Peter

Author:Brooks, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

From Rousseau to Roth, by way of the Victorian doctors who invented the sadistic devices to prevent masturbation, one detects a suspicion that the solitary, self-regarding, self-pleasuring individual is dangerous if fully unleashed. That person requires discipline, socialization, surveillance. Hands need to be tied (often literally, to the bed rails) in order to prevent one from getting at oneself, as if the discovery of the self-sufficiency of self-pleasuring would undermine reproductive sex and, even more important—here we are back with Rousseau in Émile—destroy the sociosexual connections on which human civilization is based. A masturbator, in Rousseau’s view, is not a good citizen. Those who in the wake of Tissot claimed masturbation would drive you blind or mad or kill you perhaps were recognizing, in dim and perverse ways, that getting at yourself in this way would be counterproductive, the promotion of reckless expenditure—and “to spend” in British slang has long had the meaning of “to come”—rather than thrift. It would be a version of the countereconomy envisioned by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share (La part maudite), an economy of wasteful, useless expenditure rather than hoarding and capitalization.17 As Michel Foucault has suggested, aristocratic marriage in traditional societies assured purity of descent, of the patrilineal bloodline: the antiquity and the glory of alliances created, the clear tracing of inheritance rights (no adultery allowed to women) defined your identity. The advent of the bourgeoisie in modern times tends to increase the importance of sexuality in marriage: instead of the bloodline, what counts is the projection of self, family, and property into the future, through one’s descendants: sperm rather than blood. Marriage becomes the guarantee of future descendants, of a kind of symbolic immortality through passing on of one’s genetic material and one’s cultural identity. Hence the emphasis on bodily health, on the protection of sperm (no masturbation) and the anxiety of venereal disease as seen in its hereditary consequences, a theme in a number of nineteenth-century novels.18

But one might also say—and here we turn to Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, and the notion of the modern novel as the realm of the solitary individual—that masturbation as a solitary act, getting at yourself as both subject and object of pleasure, may offer as well an encounter with an abyss. Those who claimed the horribly deleterious effects of masturbation might have been recognizing something else as well: the inherent unsatisfactoriness of human desire and fulfillment. As Freud recognized in his note of August 1938, desire never quite satisfies demand, which, in the Lacanian gloss on Freud, is always absolute, unconditional, modeled on the infant’s demand for its mother’s recognition. “Civilized sexual morality,” Freud recognized, could never be fully satisfactory. There is an urge to return to the polymorphous pleasures of infancy, to touching and self-touching. It may be that in exploring masturbation as an instance of the modernity of the modern self we encounter a problem similar to that Freud explored in his essay on the “derealization of the self,” which we will

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