Sex in the Cities. Volume 1. Amsterdam. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

      The Erotic as a Literary Phenomenon

      The relationship between the power of the imagination and the erotic is, then, the subject under examination in this book. What cultural conditions foster the development of the imagination as an individual area of a person’s psychology? What share does rationality – the ability to reason, central to the philosophy of enlightenment – have in the development of erotic imagination? What is the function of what is then imagined? Moreover, to what extent do the forces of acculturation to a mode of life in which the erotic remains unexpressed affect the powers of the imagination?

      1665/1666: Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies

      Another type of people has corrupted girls severely; those are their teachers who have to teach them in the liberal arts, and if they want to be bad they will be: anybody can imagine what type of comforts they are granted when they are teaching, alone in a chamber or when studying; anybody can think of the types of stories, fables, and histories they sometimes teach the girls to arouse their imagination and once they see this excitement and desire in these girls, how they know how to take advantage of the situation.

      I once knew a girl who came from a very good and prosperous family, I tell you, who came to ruin and made herself into a whore because her teacher told her the story, or actually fable, of Tiresias who, after having tried both sexes, was asked by Jupiter and Juno to settle the dispute of who enjoys the most pleasure when copulating, man or woman? He replied, contrary to Juno’s opinion, that this would be the woman.

      Juno was so upset about being told he was wrong that Juno blinded the poor judge, taking his eyesight. It is no wonder that this story tempted the girl because she had heard from other women how crazy men were about sex and that they enjoyed it so much but considering the judgement made by Tiresias, women can enjoy it even more and thus it should be tried, they say. Really, girls should be spared such lessons! Are there no others?

      Their teachers, however, are apt to say that they want to know everything and, since the girls are already studying, the passages and stories requiring an explanation (or those that are self-explanatory) have to be explained and told without skipping that page; and if they do skip the page, the girls will ask them why and if they answer that they skipped the page because it would corrupt the girls they are then so much more eager to learn about that passage, and they start pestering their teachers to such a degree that they have no choice but to explain it to them, because it is the nature of girls to want what is forbidden to them.

      How many female students were corrupted by reading these types of stories, as well as with those including Byblis, Caunus, and many others written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, up to the book Ars Amandi, which he also wrote.

      In addition, there are many other risqué fables and lecherous speeches published here: French, Latin, as well as Greek, Italian, and Spanish. The Spanish saying goes: ‘Dear God, keep us from a horse that speaks and a girl that talks Latin’. God only knows if their teachers want to be bad and teach their pupils such types of lesson, how they can corrupt and dirty them so that even the most decent and chaste among them will fall.

      Is it not true that the holy Augustine was gripped by pity and pain when he read the fourth book of Aeneis, which contains the affairs and the death of Dido?

      I would like to have as many hundreds of coins as there have been girls, worldly as well as pious, who have become excited, dirtied, and lost their virginity when reading Amadis de Gaule. Anybody can see the damage Greek, Latin, and other books can cause when their teachers, these cunning and corrupted foxes, these miserable good-for-nothings with their secret chambers and cabinets in the midst of their laziness, comment on and interpret these types of stories.

      Fish as a mobile or pendant, with an erotic scene inside, c. 1930. China. Porcelain.

      Vincenzo Galdi, Female nude, c. 1900. Photograph, 16.4 × 22.5 cm.

      Franz von Bayros, lesbian scene, 1907.

      Illustration for Die Bonbonniere, by Choisy le Conin (Pseud. for Franz von Bayros), plate VII. Etching.

      John Collier, Lilith, 1889. Oil on canvas, 194 × 104 cm.

      Atkinson Art Gallery Collection, Southport.

      Ulysses: The Song of the Sirens

      “To be able to say anything and everything!” is Sade’s motto. But today the body can say nothing of itself. It is the subject and object of silence.

      According to Kamper, the margins of official histories over the last 500 years contain evidence of a secret battle being fought over the nature of society and morality. That battle has left the body out in the cold.

      “The opponents in that battle may be dimly identified as the body and the intellect in their separate and apparently opposed realities – the body as basis of power and mobility, the intellect as its tools, as the ruler of rationality, and currently as the ruler too (and the subduer and the denier) of the body. The body is therefore no longer perceived.”

      So, erotic imagination falls on the dark side of the history of civilisation. As the rationalisation process continues and rewrites history on its own behalf, an “underground” history develops which – suppressed and also liable to be rewritten – is perceived (when perceived at all) as the antithesis of enlightenment.

      “Humanity had to do some terrible things to itself,” state Horkheimer and Adorno in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, “until the Self – the personal, purposefully-directed male character – was created, and some of those terrible things are repeated in every childhood.” Failures and mistakes, the repression of imagination and spontaneity, the lowering of expectations of joy – this is the price of developing an identity. It is the sacrifice of nothing less than life itself.

      Adorno and Horkheimer search The Odyssey (the story of the adventures of Ulysses) episode by episode for the price the experienced Ulysses has to pay for emerging from each adventure with his ego (the thinking, feeling, acting self) unscathed. The tales tell of risks, cunning ploys, and escapes – and of self-imposed denial —, which makes it possible for the ego to overcome the dangers and to achieve its own identity. They tell also of saying farewell to the joy of the archaic unity with nature: a unity that was internal as well as external.

      The song of the Sirens, to which Ulysses succumbs as one who knows that he already has been captivated, is reminiscent of a joy once bestowed by the “fluctuating interconnection with nature”.

      The power of man over himself, which is the basis of his Self, virtually always implies the destruction of the subject in whose service it is carried out, since what is ruled, suppressed, and dissolved in the cause of self-preservation is nothing more or less than life itself, nothing more or less than its function to solely determine its capacity for self-preservation and exactly what it is that should be preserved.

      The history of civilisation is marked by constant abstraction and formalisation.

      The history of civilisation is the history of the introversion of the victim; in other words, the history of renunciation. Individuals engaged in renunciation surrender more of their lives than is returned to them, more than the lives they are defending.

      Socialisation is undertaken as a process carried out against nature depersonalised as IT. Yet erotic imagination resurrects the sound of the distant Sirens against which mankind had to steel itself. The animal

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