Agamben, G.

8/7/2019 Agamben, G.

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Theory and History of L iterahJ J" eEdilNl by W]wl Gnth:idl an d Jodwn Schlllh'-Snssc_~~~~_,~,~~~~~,_C~-~"'-~.------'~~.----------"--~~-~~~-~~-~~-~Volume 69. Giorg io Agamben S ta nza s: W or d and f'/lOllt(Jsm i n W es te rn C ul/w 'eVolume 68. Hans Robert Jauss Q ue stio/l an d A ns we r: F orm s of D ialog ic

Un r i P r . \ ' t a l 1 r i i l l gVolume 66. Paul de Man C ri ti ca l W r it in gs , 1 95 3- 19 78Volume 64. Did ie r Cosh; N(ir/ 'OIi1 'c as CC";1illlm;wtionVolume 63. Renato Bari ll i RhetoricVolume 62. Daniel Cot tom Teia wId Culiure: Th e P ol itic s o f Intcrp"ct(ltionVolume 61. Theodor W. Adorno Kicr/;cg(wl'd: Constmction o f th e Ap


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Copyright J 99) hy t he l~ cg ems of th e L'nivcrsi~y of Millrw''''''

Ol'iginaHy r lJ :hIish[ ':d as Stan;e: 1("J parola tJ il f'}Jt!_~_r:;."T;'fI nelln n!lJwtf (lfTtjf'nf(I/!', Copyyighl J9Tlby G i ul io E in : ., u di c d it or c , T u ri nAl l ri ght s r es er ved. No par t of th is p ub lic atio n m ay b e tcprodl1('cd, s to re d in a retrieval system,or tl"ttn'-;l'niHc-d,in any form or by any means. electronic, me c ha n ic a l, p h o t( \c r JP y in g , rC('(1rding, Ofo therwise , w ithout the p rior wri tt en permiss ion o f the pub li sher .I ' I lD ! ! ,h c ' d by t he Un; \' cts i' y o f Minnes ou P res s2037 Uni lc r, ,; ty Avenue Sno lfhe", I, Minneapol i . MN 55414Printed in the Uni ted S ta te s o r America on acid, f ree paperL ib ra ry o f Congress Catafog,ng,hH'uhlitafin" DataAgarnben, Giorgio> 1942

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bleludfs hih~l()gr;lph;\_'al references and index.[ SBN 0, 81 662 037- 7 (a ci d f re e) . ~ .[SBN 0-8166-20385 (pbk. : acid f ree)I . C iv il iz at io n. \ Vc .s tC 'r H,

J, PeL(;{C'fJ~d ity a nd c u l tu re .C B 24 5. A 33 1 3 1993302.2dc20

2 . Creat ion (Li te ra ry , a rt is ti c, e tc .)I.Tit le. II . S eri es .

92-30970CI P

T he U niv er sity of l \c Jin nf_ :(; (rta is a ne q ua l- o pp o r tu n it y e d uc a to r Imel e .mrl"ye r.

' . _ c . _

In memoriam Martin Heidegger


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And here one must know that this term (stanza) has beenchosen [or technical reasons exclusive ly , so that what containsthe entire art of the canzone should be called stanza, that is, acapacious dwel ling or receptacle for the entire craf t. For justas the canzone is the container (literally lap or womb} of theentire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique ...

Dante, De vulgar! eloquentia II.9


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Contents

List of Illustrations XlNotes and Acknowledgments xiiiIntroduction xv

L The Phantasmsof Eros1. The Noonday Demon 32, Melencolia I 1 13, Melancholic Eros 164, The Lost Object 195, The Phantasms of Eros 22

II. In the World ofOdradek: TheWork of ArtConfronted with the Commodity

6, Freud; or, The Absent Object 3J7, Marx; or, The Universal Exposition 368, Baudelaire; or, The Absolute Commodity 419, Beau Brummell; or, The Appropriation of Unreality 4710. Mme Panckoucke; or, The T(lY Fairy S6HI. TheWord and the Phantasm: The Theory of the Phantasm

in the Love poetry of the Duecento11, Narcissus and Pygmalion 6312. Eros at the Mirror 73[3, Spiritus phantasticus 90

ix


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x 0CONTENTS

14. Spirits of Love 10215. Between Narcissus and Pygmalion16. The "Joy That Never Ends" 124

IV. The Perverse Image: Semiology fromthe Point of Viewof the Sphinx

III

17. Oedipus and the Sphinx 13518. The Proper and the Improper 14119. The Barrier and the Fold 152

Index 159

Illustrations

1. DUrer, Melencolia f.2. Vespertilio (bat), in Ori Apollinis N iliaci , De sacris Aegyptorium notis,

1574.3. Rubens, Heraclitus as a Melancholic. Madrid, Prado.4-5. Place settings and bookstore, f rom the Illustrated Catalogue of the Uni-

versal Exposit ion of London, 185 L6-7. Grandville, illustrations from Un autre monde (Another world).8. Grandville, Systeme de Fourier (The system of Fourier), illustration from Un

autre monde,9. Grandville, illustrations from Pet ites miseres de la vie humaine (The small

miseries of human life).10. Beau Brummell.11-12. Figure in miniature of an archaic Chinese tomb.13. The Lover at the Fountain of Narcissus (Ms. fr o 12595,fol. 12v). Paris, Bib-

Iiorheque.Nationalc.14. Narcissus (Ms. ti:. 12595, foL 12v). Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale:15. Pygmalion as Idolater (Ms. Douce 195, fol. 149v). Oxford, Bodleian

Library.16. Pygmalion and the Image (Ms. Douce 195, fol. 150r ). Oxford, Bodle ian

Library.17. Stories ofPygmalion (Ms. fr o 12592, fol. 62v). Paris, Bibliotheque Nation-

ale.18. The Lover and the Image (Ms. 387, fo! ' 146v). Valencia.

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xii U ILLUSTRATIONS

19. Venus and the Image (Ms. 387, fol. 144r). Valencia.20. Venus and the linage (Ms. fr o 380, fol. 135v). Paris, Bibliotheque Nation-

ale.21. 77w Lover, the Image, and the Hose (Ms. 387, fol, 146v). Valencia.22. "Fol amour as Idolat ry," detai l from the left s ide of the central por tal of the

Cat h ed ra I 0f N otre- Dame, Paris.23. Lovers as Idolaters, birth salver attributed to the Master of Saint Mart in.Paris, Louvre.24..25 . Industrious Man and The Future Work , from Ori Apollinis Niliaci, De

sacris Aegyptorum notis, 1574.26. What I s Grave , Delights, from J. Catz, Proteus (Rotterdam, 1627).27. Love Is the Father of Elegance, from 1. Catz, Proteus.

Notes and Acknowledgments

The essay "The Phantasms of Eros" appeared, in a shorter version, in Paragone(Apri l 1974) . The origina l nucleus of "In the Wor ld of Odradek" was publ ishedwith the title "1 1 dandy e il feticcio" (The dandy and the fetish) in Ulise (Feb-ruary ] 9 72 ) .The spellings "phantasm," "phantasy," and "phantastic" throughout the

book indicate the technically precise use of these terms.Translations that are not documented to a published Bnglish-Ianguage source

may be assumed to be the t ranslator' s own.The author wishes to thank Frances Yates of the Warburg Institute of London,

whose courtesy made it possible for him to pursue research in the library of theInstitute. He also thanks the conservators of the Bib liotheque Nat ionalein Parisand Professor Traini of the Caetani fund of the library of the AccademiaNazio-nale dei Lincei,The University of Minnesota Press wishes to thank Michael Hardt fo r his in-

valuable assistance with the translation.

xiii


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Introduction

It i s possible, perhaps, to accept tha t a novel may never actual ly recount the storyi t has promised to tell . But i t i s common toexpect resul ts of a work of cri ticism,or a t least arguable posit ions and, as they say, working hypotheses. Yet when, theterm "cri tic ism" appears in the vocabulary of Western philosophy, it signifiesra ther inquiry a t the l imits of knowledge about prec isely that which can be nei-ther posed nor grasped. I f cri ticism, insofar as i t t races the l imits o f t ruth, offersa glance of "truth's homeland" like "an island nature has enclosed within im-mutable boundaries," it must also remain open to the fascination of the "wideand storm- tossed sea" tha t draws "the sai lor incessant ly toward adventures heknows not how to refuse yet may never bring to an end,"Thus for the lena group, which at tempted through the project of a "universal

progressive poetry" to abol ish the distinc tion between poetry and the cr it ica l-philological disciplines, a critical work worthy of the name was one that includedits own negation; it was, therefore, OTIC whose essential contentconsisted in pre-cisely what it did not contain. The corpus of the European critical essay in thepresent century ispoor in examples of such a genre. Leaving aside a work that byits very absence is "more than complete" =-that of Felix Fcncon, celu i qui si-lence (he who silences)- there is strictly speaking perhaps only a single bookthat deserves to be called cri tical : the Urspriing des dcutschea Trauerspiel (Theorigin of German tragic drama) of Walter Benjamin.

A certain sign of the extinction of such critical thinking is that among thosewho today draw their authority more or less from the same tradition there aremany who proclaim the crea tive character of cr iticism - prec isely when the arts

x v


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xvi 0INTRODUCTION

have for some time renounced all pr etense a t creativity, I f the formula of "bothpoet and critic" (poietes llama kai kritikosr, applied for the first t ime in antiquityto the Alexandr ian poet-philologist Philitas, may once aga in se rve as an exem-plary de finition of the modern artist, and if c ritic ism today truly identifie s withthe work of ar t, it is not because cr itic ism itse lf is also' . creative , " but O f at all)insofar as cri tic ism is also a form of negat iv ity, Cri ti ci sm is in fact noth ing otherthan the process of i ts own i ronic self-negat ion: preci sely a "self-annih ilat ingnothing,'; or a "god tha t self-destruc ts," according to Hege l' s p rophetic, if ill-willed, def inition, Hegel's objection, tha t "Miste r Fr iedrich von Schlegel,"Solger , Naval is , and other theoret ic ians of i rony remained s talled at "absolu teinf inite negativity" and would have ended by making of the least ar tistic "thetrue principle of art," marke ting "the unexpressed as the best thing," misses thepoint: tha t the nega tivity of irony is not the provisiona l negative of dialectic,which the magic wand of sublation (Ardhehung) is always already in the act oft ransforming into a pos it ive, but an absolute and irretr ievable negat iv ity that doesnot , for that, renounce knowledge, The claim that a pos ture genuinely both philo-sophical and scienti fi c (which bas provided an essential impetus to Indo-Euro-pean l inguis ti cs , among other things) arose from Romantic i rony, preci sely withthe Schlegels, remains to be questioned in terms of the prospects for giving ac ritical founda tion to the human sciences, For if in the human sciences subjectand object necessarily become identified, then the idea of a sc ience without ob-ject is not a playful pa radox, but perhaps the most ser ious ta sk that r emains en-trusted to thought in our time. Wha t is now more and more fr equently concealedby the endless sharpening of knives on behal f of a methodnlogy with noth ing leftto cut- e-namely, the rea lization that the object to have been grasped has fina llyevaded knowledge , -- is ins tead reasser ted by cri ti ci sm as i ts own speci fic charac-ter.Secular enl ightenment , the most profound project of crit ic ism, does not pos-sess its object. L ike a ll authentic quests, the quest of criticisrn consists not indiscovering its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessibili ty.European poets of the th ir teenth century called the essential nucleus of their po-etry the stanza, that is, a "capacious dwelling, receptacle," because it safe-guarded, along with all the formal e lements of the canzonc, tha tjoi d'amor thatthese poe ts entrusted to poe try as its unique object. But wha t is this objec t? Towhat enjoyment does poetry dispose its stanza as the receptive "womb" of itsentire art? Wha t does its trobar so tenaciously enclose?

Access to what is problematic in these.questions is barred by the forgetfulnessof a scission that derives from the origin of our culture and that is usually ac-cepted' as the most natural thing= that goes, so to speak, without saying-s-whenin fac t it is the only thing truly wor th inter rogating. The scission in question isthat between poetry and philosophy, between the poetic word and the word ofthought. This spl it i s so fundamental to our cul tural t radi tion that Plato could al-ready declare it "an anc ient enmity," According to a conception that is only im-

INTRODUCTION [J xvii

plicit ly contained in the P latonic cri tique of poetry, but that has in modern t imesacquired a hegemonic cha racter , the sc ission of the word is construed to meantha t poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows itsobject without possess ing i t. In the West, the word is thus div ided between a wordtha t is unaware, as if fa llen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge byrepresenting it in beautiful form, and a word that has all seriousness and con-sciousness for it self but does not enjoy i ts object because it does not know how torepresent it.The split be tween poe try and philosophy testifies to the impossibility, for

Western cul ture , of ful ly possess ing the object of knowledge (for the problem ofknowledge is a problem of possession, and every problem of possession is aproblem of enjoyment, that i s, of language). I n our culture, knowledge (accord-ing to an ant inomy that Aby Warburg diagnosed as the "schizophrenia" of West-ern cul ture) i s d iv ided between inspi red-ecstati c and rat ional-conscious poles,nei ther ever succeeding in wholly reducing the other . Insofar as phi losophy andpoetry have passively accepted th is d iv is ion, philosophy has fai led to elaborate aproper I an gu ag e , as if there could be a royal road to truth that would avoid theproblem of its r epresenta tion, and poetry has developed ne ithe r a method norself-consciousness. Whatis thus overlooked is the fact that every authent ic poeticproject i s d irected toward knowledge, just as every authent ic act of phi lo~ophy isa lways dir ected toward joy, The name of Hrilder lin- c of a poet, tha t is, for whompoe try was above a ll problema tic and who often hoped that it would be raised tothe level of the mechane (mechanical ins trument) of the ancients so that i ts pro-cedures could be calculated and taught-s-and the dialogue that with i ts u tteranceengages a thinke r who no longer designa tes his own meditation with the name of"philosophy" a re invoked here to witness the urgency, for our cultur e, of r edis-cover ing the unity of our own fragmented word,Criticism is horn at the moment when the scission reaches i ts ext reme point . It

i s s ituated where, in \VeRteTl lcul ture , the word comes unglued from i tsel f; and i tpoints, on the near or till' side of tha t separation, toward a unita ry sta tus for theutte rance, From the outside , this situa tion of criticism can be expressed in theformula according to which it neither represents nor knows, but knows the rep-resentation, To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness with-out enjoyment cri ti ci sm, opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed andthe possession of wha t cannot be enjoyed. In this way, criticism interpre ts theprecept of Gargantua: "Science without consciousness i s nothing hut the ruin ofthe soul." What is secluded in the stanza of criticism is nothing,~but this nothingsafeguards unappropriabili ty as its most precious possession.In the following pages, we will pur sue a model of knowledge in ope ra tions suchas the despe ra tion of the melancholic or the l'erlellgl1l1ng (di savowal) of the fe-t ishi st : operations in which des ire s imul taneously denies and aff irms i ts object,and thus succeeds in enter ing in to relation with something that o therwise it would


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xviii IJ INTRODUCTION

have been unable either to appropriate or enjoy. This is the model that has pro-vided the frame both for an examination of human objects transfigured by thecommodity, and for the attempt to discover, through analysis of emblematic formand the (nin os) of the Sphinx, a model of signifying that might escape the

situation of signifier and signified that dominates Western reflectionFrom this perspective , one can grasp the proper meaning of the cen-of the present inquiry-the reconstruct ion of the theory of the phan-subtends the ent ire poetic project bequeathed by troubadour and St il -

novist lyric to European culture and in which, through the dense textualentrebescamen (interlacing, interweaving) of phantasm, desire, and word, poetryconstructed i ts own author ity by becoming, it se lf , the stanza offered to the end-less joy tgioi ehe mai non f ina) of erotic experience.Each of the essays gathered here thus t races, wi thin i ts hermeneu tic c ircle, a

topology of joy (gaudil/m), of the stanza through which the human spiri t f : spends to the impossible task of appropriating what must in every case remamunappropriable. The path of the dance in the labyrinth, leading into the heart ofwhat i tkeeps at a distance, is the spat ial model symbol ic of human cul ture and i tsroyal road (hodos basileiei toward a goal for which only a detour is adequate.From this point of view, a discourse tha t is aware tha t to hold "tenaciously whatis dead exacts the greatest ef fort" and that eschews' 'the magic power that t rans-forms the negative into being" must necessarily guarantee the unappropriabiliryof i ts objec t. This discourse behaves with respect to i ts object nei ther as the mas-ter who simply negates it in the act of enjoyment nor like the slave who workswith it and transforms i t in the defer ra l of desire : i ts opera tion is, ra ther , tha t of arefined love, a [in' amors that at once enjoys and defers, negates and affirms,accepts find repels ; and whose only rea lity is the unreal ity of a word "qu'amasI'uura I e chatz la lebre ab 1 0 bou I e nadi contra suberna" [that heaps up thebreeze / and hunts the hare with the ox I and swims against the tide (Amanti)aniel, canso "En cest sonet coind' e leri." \IV. 43-45)].From this vantage one can speak. of a topology of the unreal . Perhaps the topos,for Aristotle "so difficult to grasp" but whose power is "marvelous and prior toall others" and which Plato, in the Sophist, conceives as a "third genre" of be-ing, is 110t necessari ly something "reaL" In this sense we can take ser iously thequestion that Ar is tot le puts in the four th book of the Physics: "Where is the ca-pristag, where the sphinx?" tpou gar esti tragclaphos he sphinx). The answer, tobe sure, is "nowhere"; but perhaps only because the terms in quest ion are them-selves topoi. We must still accustom ourselves to think of the "place" not assomething spatial, but as something more original than space. Perhaps, followingPlato's suggestion, we should think of it as a pure difference, yet one given thepower to act such that "what is not, will- in a certain sense be; and what is, w~llin a certain sense not be ." Only a phi losophical topology, analogous to what 11 1mathematics is defined as an analysis situs (analysis of site) in opposition to

INTRODUCTION 0 xix

analysis magnitudtnis (analysis of magnitude) would be adequate to the toposoutopos, the placeless place whose Borromcan knot we have tried to draw inthese pages. Thus topological explorat ion is constant ly or iented in the l ight ofutopia . The claim that themat ica lly susta ins this inquiry into the void, to which i ti s constra ined by i ts cr itical projec t, i s precise ly that only if one is capable ofentering into relation with unreality and with the unappropriable as such is it pos-sible to appropriate the real and the positive. Thus thi.s volume is intended as afi rs t, insufficient at tempt to follow in the wake of the projec t tha t Robert Musilentrusted to his unfinished novel: a project that, afew years previously, the wordsof a poet had expressed in the formula "Whoever seizes the greatest unrealitywill shape the greatest reality. "


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Part 1T he P hantasm s of E ros

Now loss, cruel as it may be, cannot do anything againstpossession: it completes it, if you wish, it affirms it, It is not,at bot tom, but a second acquisi tion-cthis time wholly internal-:and equally intense,

Rilke

Many attempted in vain to say the most joyful things joyfulfy;here, f inally, they are expressed in mourning, Holderiili


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Chap ter 1The Noonday Demon

During the whole of the Middle Ages, a scourge worse than the plague that in-fested the castle s, villas, and pa laces of the c ities of the wor ld fell on the dwe ll-ings of spiritual life, penetrated the cells and cloisters of monasteries, theTheba id of the he rmits, the convents of rech~se". Acedia (sloth), tristitia (sor-row), taedium vitae (weariness, loathing of l ife) , and desidia (idleness) arc thenames the church fathe rs gave to the dea th this sin induced in the soul; and, al-though its desolate effigy occupie s the f ifth position in the lists of the SlI111//1aevirtutum et vitiorum (Summa of virtues and vices), in the miniatures of manu-scr ip ts, and in the popular representat ions of the seven capi tal s ins, l an ancienthermeneutic tradition considered it the most lethal of the vices, the only one forwhich no pardon was possible.The fathers exercised themselves with par ti cu lar fervor against the dangers of

this "noonday demon"? that chose its victims among the homines religiosi (re-ligious men), a ssailing them when the sun reached its highest point over the ho-rizon, Perhaps for no other temptation of the soul do their writings show such a piti-less psychological penetration and such a punctilious and chilling phenomenology;The ga;w of the slothful man rests obsessively on the window and withhis fantasy, he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him.At the squeak of the door, he leaps to his feet. He hears a voice, runs toface the window and look out, and yet he does not descend to thestreet, but turns back to sit down where. he was, torpid and as ifdismayed. If he reads , he interrupts h imsel f rest less ly and, a minutelater, slips into sleep. If he wipes his face with his hand, he extends the

3


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4 [J THE NOONDAY DEMON

fingers and, having removed his eyes f rom i~e book, f~xes them on. thewall. Again he gazes at the book, proceeds tor a fe~ 1l l1~s,mumb.hngthe end of each word he reads; and mcnD'Nhile he fills ius head withidle (~IcIl1ations, he counts the number of the pages and the sheets ofthe bindings, and he begins to bate the let te rs and the bCllut ifulmini il turcsC"he has before his eyes, unt il, at the last, he closes the bookand uses it as a cushion for his head, falling into a brief and shallowsleep, from which a sense of privation and hunger that he must satisfywakes him.:'As soon '\S this demon begins to obsess the mind of some unfortunateone: it in~in\lates into him' a horror of the place he finds himself in, animpatience with his own cell, and a disdain for the brothers who. hv~with him who now seem to him careless and vulgar. It makes bun inertbefore e;ery activi ty tha t unfolds within the wal ls ? f his ~ell, it preventshim from staying there in peace and aHcnding to his readl llg; . and beholdthe wretched one begin to compla in that he obta ins . no b~neht f romconventual life, and he sighs and moans that his spirit Will pro~uce nofrui t so long as he remains where he is. Querulously. be p ;oclanns.himself inept at fac ing any task of the spiri t and ~ff11ctShImself. wi th,being always empty and immobile at the same pomt, he who might havebeen useful to others and guided them, and who has instead notconcluded anything or benefited anyone. He plunges into exaggeratedpraise of distan t and absent mOl1


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6 D THE NOONDAY DEMON

slothful is not, therefore, the, awareness of an evi l, but , on the contrary, the con-templation of the greatest of goods: acedia is precisely the vertiginous and fright-ened \vithdrawal (recessus) when faced with the task impl ied by the place of manbefore God." Hence, that is, insofar as sloth is the horrified flight before thatwhich cannot be evaded in any way, acedia is a mortal evil; it is, indeed, themor tal malady par excel lence, whose distorted image Kierkegaard f ixed in thedescription of the most fearful of its daughters: "the despcrati


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'S"J-pO~i~lll~-J)!-I'S!J!I:dJlH J;)Pllll p:)lUHsqns.)qol lqe uuo ,\"Yl )"4) 4 ', !!QU j' " I l) , {suo s , l! l!1q '(J 'lg '~~A1XfS) JlJ!IJd.JV ;J1l!!!f JO 1>!\ juupuuqu ,{IIJU')SlP11puu 0\ ~lq!S,,)J " ! 1 , 'S!Jl;)'I P'P!I"l 'Si~I!J,\\ qJU~ld i lU 'A!1 JO "jUJ4 101 "" pu e Oln~ll 1St"" ~lj) JO OUJ0 pAOU ISJ!] 'ql 'V,IU.mV tlj '("P!IJ" til17 'S ~Ull "n '/) . ) /8,,/u'' 'IJ /J!UiI"'S '0,),) (,'S"'41/!JjI>l}/WI pm,Holp W UJ : '1 [1 fo S U , U , J p ' J V , O \ g4) O J ;;lI~ll!UljJd 'lj)()I" lUOJj Jl"l l!iluo l i e ) W c p il.\lj ,IJt[!" 8l!i I I U ' , ' s l d n ~ . / dS1J !P 'W S:J.J , lUdwi ())JJJlp~J ~')I1,)jV"""'( flue S.l'~IJJ/P,I) "BIDlm U~J!) '!)U;)lU UlJllO!wik\J Pi; ,IU~U1l-1011';:U~PJJI; XJ !JPO ~ l l .!~soJ ' : )nnb i-Jnbl!nb g ! I B lilJ~lW H!lilUO' ' t:1-lL:u;:.:H;JJ liJJ!.J lU;~_JOd.IO~pn .IIlJtHunp;).1ll'!JUJIOlWJO:) 1G : "lq~S0!lUl ; ' lOU] H( A.lOi1'.;UD Aq IY.~~Rf.:mHm.) J:-;jjlj~ 01 P':'K)I"I.P2lJaq uno ;)-:;:.)41 "'S; ; JA.l -; ; 'SqOSl-;lU04.LlUrGS SB 'jnq '(:(l!~O'JnJ '.\~~SD4jJ,-\.~\"I!I~4~~SU!FJ~nb~!pAHPoq ~pU~l(I.to ':'i~;;IusnoJo;);}f),lI!'J~)U;)iOHUIO~ - : : ~ ~ ~ ) u J - I P ~.'.~-VJ!.\'I)!)!U 'Slll.l,~(}qj,),t ':-"Uj!lN.U~Siil '.\'!L{o(LwJ upnp!ldH1! r jPU)W .~"l)jlU.}IJ.ltjdw,!' IJUu. ,J/uuwrJs 'smp;v!J(/) U,)AJS :) lsq 'd..l0P~!)1'(pU!lU dIU JO i?UJl0pur!f~\ "S~J~)J;).1d pm: S:JlLU 01 plll-;]gJ lP!.-\\. ro d io i ' uo p n ra d so p ' .{ HU l ! U l: il pmd 1,10.}tHU ":}~)~{uw) S!/UiJiU- U!-I-VSUI,J 'lJjd.J.J,JLwl V:J.lp i od so i 'OND.wd~ap '.\1))11l1.1I//)1I!,,,1 ' ,m;mo. / 'U!/!jlilU :qjO!~ JO ' . IJI4; lnup x,s 0JB OJ.]"l!!'AJO:3~JO 01 ;)lIlpJU;)JV '~

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10 0THE NOONDAY DEMON

netiis, 1591. p. 168). The image of the 10"1 .\.\1/.1, of d rawing back, constan t in the pat ri st ic descr ip -t ions o f s to th , a lso appea red. a s we wil l s ec ! in 1he .mNHc


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120 MELENCOLIA Iplexionatus (worst complected), sad. envious, malevolent , avid, f raudulent ,cowardly, and earthly.Nevertheless, an ancient tradition associated the exercise of poetry, philoso-

phy, and the arts with this most wretched of all humors. "Why is it," asks one ofthe most extravagant of the Aristotelian problcmata, "that all men who are out-s tanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melanchol ic, and some to such anextent thatthey are infected by the disease arising from black bi le?" The answerAristot le gave to his own question marks the point o f depar ture of a dialect ica lprocess in the course of which the doctrine of geni ll s came to be joined indisso l-ubly to that of the melancholic humor under the spell of a symbolic complexwhose emblem ambiguously established itself in the winged angel of DUrer'sMelencolia (see f igure 1);

Those for instance in whom the bile is considerable and cold becomesluggish and stupid, whi le those with whom it i s excessive and hotbecome. mad, good-natured or amorous, and easily moved to passionand desire. , , . But many, because this heat is near to the seat of themind, arc affected by the diseases of madness or frenzy, which accountsfor the Sibyls, Bacis, and all inspired persons, when their condition isdue not to a disease but to a natural mixture. Maraeus. the Syracusan,was an even better poet when he was mad. But those with whom theexcessive heat has sunk to a modera te amount are melanchol ic, thoughmore intelligent and less strange, but they differ from the rest of theworld in many ways, some in education, some in the arts, and othersagain in statesmanship'. 3This double polarity of black bile and its link to the' 'divine mania" of Plato

were gathered and developed with par ticular fervor in that curious misce llany ofmystic sects and avan t-garde cabals that gathered, in the Florence of Lorenzo theMagnificent, around Marsilio Ficino. In the thought o f Picino, who recognizedhimself as a. melanchol ic and whose horoscope showed "Saturnum in Aquariaascendenrem" (Saturn ascendant in Aquarius), the rehabilitation ofmelancholywent hand in hand with an ennobling of the influence of Saturn," which theastrological t radit ion associated with the melancholic temperament as the mostmalignant of planets, in the intui tion of polar ized extremes where the ruinousexperience of opacity and the ecstat ic ascent to divine contempla tion coexistedalongsideeach other . In this context , the e lemental influence of the ear th and theastra l influence of Saturn were uni ted to confer on the melanchol ic a natura l pro~pensity to interior withdrawal and contemplative knowledge;The nature of the melanchol ic humor fol lows the quali ty of ear th, whichnever dispersed like the other e lements, but concentrated more str ict ly initself. , . such is also the nature of Mercury and Saturn, in virtue ofwhich the spiri ts , ga thering themselves at the cen ter, bring back the

MELENCOLlA I D 13apex of the soul from what is foreign to it to what is proper to it, fix itin contemplat ion, and al low it to penetrate to the cen ter o f things. 5Thus the cannibal and castrated god, represented in medieval imagery as lame

and brandishing the harvesting scythe of death, became the sign under whoseequivocal domination the noblest species of man, the "religious contemplative"destined to the invest igat ion ofthe supreme mysteries, found i ts place next to the"rude and material" herd of the wretched chi ldren of Saturn.I t i s not easy to discern the precise moment when the moral doctrine of the noon-day demon emerged from the cloister to join ranks with the ancient medicalsyndrome of the black-bi led temperament . When the iconographic types of theslothful and the melancholic appeared fused in calendar illustrations and populara lmanacs at the end of the Middle Ages, the process must have already been un-der way for some lime; only a POOf understanding of sloth, one that identifies it"with its late travesty as the "guilty sleep" of the lazy person, can explain whyPanofsky and Saxl , in their attempt to reconstruct the genealogy of DUrer'sMefcl1calia, reserved such scant space for the patristic literature on the "noondaydemon." To this poor understanding we also owe thc er roneous opinion (repeated .by all who have tradi tional ly preoccupied themselves with this problem)" thatacedia had a purely negative valuat ion in the Middle Ages. Itmaybe supposed,on the contrary, that the patristic discovery of the double polarity of tristitia-acedia prepared the ground for the Renaissance reevalua tion of the at rabi lioustemperament within the context of a vision in which the noonday demon, as thetemptation of the re ligious, and black humor , as the specific malady of the con-templative, should appear assimilable, and in which melancholy, having under-gone a gradual process of moral iza tion, presented i tsel f as, so to speak, the layheir of cloistral sorrow and gloom, 7

In the Medic ine of the Soul of Hugh of St . Victor , the process of a llegorica ltransfiguration of humoral theory appeared close to completion, If in Hildegardvon Bingen the negative polarity of melancholy was still interpreted as the sign oforiginal sin, in Hugh the black bile was now identified rather with the tristitiautilis (useful sor row) in a perspect ive where the humoral pa tho logy became thecorporeal vehicle of a mechanism of redemption:

The human soul uses four humors: sweetness l ike blood, bi tterness l ikered bile, sadness like black bile ... , Black bile is cold and dry, but iceand dryness can be interpreted now in a good, now in an evil sense.... It renders men now somnolent, now vigilant, that is, now gravewith anguish, now vigilant and intent on celestial desires .... Youohtainc~i, through blood, the sweetness of c~ari~; have now, throughblack bi le , 0 melancholy, sor row for your sins!This reciprocal penetra tion of slo th and melancholy maintained in tact the ir


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1.40 MELENCOLlA I

double polarity in the idea of a mortal risk latent in the noblest of human inten-tions, or the possibility of salvation hidden in the greatest danger, With this inmind we can understand why the "greedy desire to see the supreme good"should be found in the writings of Constantine the African, the master of themedica l school of Salerno, as one of the causes of melancholy of the re lig ions"and why, on the other hand, the theolog ian Gui llaume d'Auvergne could aff irmthat in his day "many pious and re ligious men ardent ly desi red the melancholydisease."?' In the stubborn contemplative vocation of the saturnine temperamentreappears the perverse Eros of the slothful , who keeps his or her own desire f ixedon the inaccessible.

Notesl . Th o. "'0,1 CI)I11pICk s tudy on melancholy remains tha t of Klibnnsky, Panofsky, and Sax). Sat-

IInJ and ,1/1'/rmchoiy (London, 1964), whose omission,' and doubtful points will be noted in thecourse of this chapter.

, 2, T h is symptom (and tJot,~' P an of sk y s ee ms to h ol d, .slothful somnolence, especially given thatthe ~H l tho r i ta ! l ve Ar~sIOlle-Dp. s onmo e t vigilia, 457


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Chapter 3Melancholic Eros

The same tradition that associated the melancholic temperament with poetry, phi-losophy, and art attributed to it an exasperated inclination to Eros. Aristotle, afterhaving affirmed the genial vocation of melancholies, placed lustfulness amongtheir essential characteristics:Now the liquid and the mixing of the black bile is due to breath ...and the melanchol ic are usual ly lustfu l. For sexual exci tement is due tobreath. The penis proves this as it quickly increases from smal l to largebecause of the breath in it. (Problems, trans. w. S. Hett, 953b)From this moment on, erotic disorder figures among the traditional attributes

of black bile. IIf,analogously, the slothful man was also represented in medievalt rea tises on the vices as philedonos (pleasure-loving), and Alcuin could say that"he becomes sluggish in carnal vices," in the strongly mOl'[llizing interpretationof humoral theory by Hildegard von Bingen the abnormal Eros of the melan-cholic assumed no less than the aspect of a feral and sadist ic disturbance:Melancholies have great hones rhllt contain little marrow, whichnevertheless burns so strongly tha t they are incont inent with women likevipers, .. they are excessive in lust and without restraint with women,like asses, so much so that if they ceased from the depravation theywould readily become mad ... their embrace is hateful, twisted, andmortal like that of predatory wolves ... they have commerce withwomen, hut nevertheless they despise them."But the nexus between love and melancholy had long since found its theorer -

) 6

MELANCHOLIC EROS 017

leal foundation in a medical tradition that constantly considered love and melan-choly as re la ted, i f not ident ica l, maladies , In this t radi tion, fully art iculated inthe Viaticum of the Arab physician Haly Abbas (who, through the tradition ofConstantine the African, profoundly influenced medieval European medicine),love, which appeared with the name amor hereos or amor heroycus, and melan-choly were catalogued in contiguous rubrics among the mental diseases," On oc-casion, as in lhe Speculum doctrinai of Vincent de Beauvais , they appeared infact under the same rubr ic : "de melancol ia nigra et canina et de amore qui ereosdicitur" (of black and canine melancholy and of love that is called ereos). Thesubstantial proximity of erotic and melancholic pathology found its expression inthe De amore of Ficino. The very process of falling in love here became themechanism that unhinges and subverts the moral equilibrium, while, conversely,the determined contemplative inclination of the melancholic pushes him or herfatally toward amorous passion. The willful figural synthesis that emerged fromthis mechanism and that pushed Eros to assume the obscure saturnine traits of themost sinister of the temperaments must have remained operat ive for centuries inthe popular conception of the amorous melancholic, whose emaciated and am-biguous car ica ture made i ts t imely appearance among the emblems of black hu-mor Oil the frontisniece of sixreenrh-cenmry treMises OIl melancholy:Wherever the assiduous intentions of the soul bear themselves, therea lso the spiri ts di rect themselves, which are the vehicles or theinstruments of the soul. The spirits are produced in the heart with themost subtle part of the blood, The soul of the lover is pulled toward theimage of the beloved wri tten in the imagination and toward the belovedi tsel f. Thi ther are a ttrac ted also the spiri ts , and, in the ir obsessive f light ,they are exhausted. Because of this a constant refurbishing of pureblood is necessary to replace the consumed spiri ts , there where the mostdelicate and transparent par tic les of blood. are exhaled each day in orderto regenerate the spirits. Because of this, pure and bright blood isdissolved, and nothing remains but impure, thick, arid, and black blood.Then the body dries out and dwindles, and the lovers becomemelancholic. It is in fact the dry, thick, and black blood that producesmelancholic or black bile, which fills the head with its vapors, dries outthe bra in, and. ceaselessly oppresses, day and night , the soul wi th darkand frightening visions .... It i s because of having observed thiscondition timt the doctors of ant iquity have af fi rme~1that love is apassion that resembles the melancholy disease. The physician Rasisprescribes therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness,walking."In the same passage, the specific character of melancholic Eros was identified

by Ficino as disjunction and excess. "This tends to occur," he wrote, "to thosewho, misusing love , t ransform what right ly belongs to contemplat ion into thedesi re of the embrace ." The erot ic intention tha t unleashes the melanchol ic dis-


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180 MELANCHOLIC EROS

order presents i tsel f as that which would possess and touch what ought merely tobe the object o f contemplat ion, and the t ragic insanity of the saturnine tempera-ment thus finds i ts root in the intimate contradic tion of a gesture tha t would em-brace the unobtainable. It i s f rom this perspective tha t we should interpre t thepassage f rom Henry of Ghent tha t Panofsky placed in relation to DUrer 's imageand according to which melancholies "cannot conceive the incorporeal" as such,because they do not know "how to extend their intelligence beyond space andsize." This is not, as some have claimed, merely a matter of a static limit in themental structure of melancholies that excludes them from the metaphysicalsphere, but rather of a dialect ica l limi t t ied to the erot ic impulse to t ransgress ,which transforms the contemplative intention into the' 'concupiscence of the ern-brace." That is, the incapacity of conceiving the incorporeal and the desire tomake of it the object of an embrace are two faces of the same coin, o f the processin whose course the traditional contemplative vocation ofthe melancholic revealsitself vulnerable to a violent disturbance of desire menacing it from within."It is curious that this erotic constellation of melancholy should have so persis-

tent ly escaped scholars who have at tempted to trace the genealogy and meaningof Durer's Melencolia, Any iuterprctarion=-whatevcr its ability to decipher oneby one the f igures inscribed in i ts f ie ld of vision -- tha t fa ils to consider the fun-damcutal relevance of black bile to the sphere of erot ic desire is bound to be ex-eluded f rom the mystery so emblematical ly fixed in DUrer's image, Only when i tis understood that the image is placed under the sign of Eros is i t possible simul-taneously to keep and reveal the secre t of the emblem, whose al legorica l inten-t ion is ent irely subtended in the space between Eros and i ts phantasms,

Notes1 , The ~""Oci


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20 0 THE LOST OBJECTthe libidinal investment returns to the ego and the object i s s imultaneously incor-porated in the ego." 1

Nevertheless , with respect to the genet ic process of mourning, melancholiapresents a relat ionship to i ts origin that i s especially difficu lt to explain . Freuddoes not conceal h is embarrassment before the undeniable proof that, a lthoughmourning follows a loss that has r eally occurred, in me lancholia not only is itunclear what object has been lost, it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss ata ll. "I t must be admitted," Freud wr ites, with a certain discomfort, "that a losshas indeed occurred, without i tbeing known what has been los t. " Shortly there-after , in the attempt togloss over the contradiction posed by a loss without a lostobject, Freud speaks of an "unknown loss" or of an "object-loss that escapesconsciousness." In fact, the examination of the mechanism of melancholia , a sdescr ibed by Freud and Abraham, shows thatthe withdrawal of l ibido is the orig-inal datum, beyond which inves tigation can go no fur ther ; if we wish tomaintainthe analogy with mourning, wc ought to say that melancholia offers the paradoxof an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object, Herepsychoanalysis appears to have reached conclusions very similar to those intuitedby the church fathers, who conceived of sloth as the withdrawal from a good tha thad not yet been lost and who interpreted the most terrible of its daughters,despair , asan ant icipation ' of unful fil lment and damnation. As, in the ease of ace-dia, the withdrawal not from a defec t, but from a frau t ic cxnccrbation of desirethat renders its object inaccessible to i tself in the desperate attempt to protect i t-self from the loss of that object and to adhere to it at least in its absence, so itmight be said that the withdrawal of melancholic libido has no other purpose thanto make viable an appropr ia tion in a situation in which none is r eally possible,From this point of view, melancholy would be not so much the regressive reaction tothe loss ofthe love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable objectappear as iflost . If the libido behaves as if a loss had occurred although nothing hasin fact been los t: this i s because the l ib ido s tages a s imulation where what cannot belost because it has never been possessed appea rs as lost, and wha t could never bepossessed because i t had never perhaps exis ted may be appropriated insofar as i t i slost Atthis point the specific ambition of the ambiguous melancholy project , whichthe analogy with the exemplary mechanism of mourning had in par t d is figured andrendered unrecognizable, becomes understandable: i t is what the ancient humoraltheory rightly identified in the will to transform into an object of amorous embrace,what should have remained only an object of contemplation, Covering its object withthe funereal trappings of mourning, melancholy confers upon it the phantasmagori-cal reali ty of what is lost; but insofar as such mourning isfor an unohtainable object,the s trategy of melancholy opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marksout a scene inwhich the ego may enter into relat ion with it and attempt an appropri-ation such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten.If this is true, if melancholy succeeds in appropriating its own object only to

the extent that it af firms its 103s, it is unde rstandable why Freud remained so

tHE LOST OBJECT 0 21struck by thc ambivalence of the me lancholic tendency, so milch so as to make itone of the essential characteristics of the malady. In melancholia, love and hate->engaged in pitched battle around the object, "one to separate the libido from it,the other to defend from attack th is pos ition of the libido ' ' ..= coexist and reconcilein one of those compromises possible only, under the laws of the unconscious, 11compromise whose ident if icat ion remains among the most fecund acquisit ionspsychoanalysi s has bequeathed to the sciences of the spir it,In the case of the fet ishi st VerlclIgmmg (disavowal), in the conflict betweenthe perception of reality (which forces the chi ld to renounce his phantasy) and hisdes ire (which drives him to deny i ts percept ion) , the chi ld does neither one thingnor the other (or , rather, does both things s imultaneous ly, repudiating , on the onehand, the evidence of his perceptions, and recognizing reali ty , on the other hand,through the assumption of a pe rverse symptom). Similarly, in melancholia theobject is neither appropriated nor lost, but both possessed and lost at the sametirne." And as the fetish is at once the sign of something and its absence, andowes to this contradiction its own phantomatic sta tus, so the objec t of the me l-ancholic projec t is a t once rea l and unreal, incorporated and lost, a ffirmed anddenied. It does not surprise us then that Freud was able to speak, in regard tome lancholia, of a "triumph of the object over the ego," clarifying tha t "the ob-ject has 'been, yes, suppressed, but it has shown itself stronger than the ego."This is a curious triumph, which consists in conquering through autosuppression;however , it is prec isely in the gesture that abolishes the object tha t the melan-chol ic demonstrates his or her ext reme fideli ty to i t.

From this per spective we can also understand in what sense ought to be takenboth Freud 's correlation (made in Abraham's foots teps) between melancholy and"the oral or canniba l phase in the evolution of the libido," where the ego aspiresto incorporate i ts object by devouring i t, and the s ingular obs tinacy with whicheighteenth-century legal psychiatry class if ied as forms of melancholia the casesof cannibalism that f ill with horror s the c riminal chronic le s of the per iod. Theambiguity of the me lancholic relationship to the object was thus assimila ted tothe cannibalizing that des troys and also incorporates the object of libido . Behindthe "melanchol ic ogres" of the legal archives of the nineteenth century , the sin-i ster shadow of the god who devours his chi ldren r ises again , that Chronos-Sat-urn whose tradit ional associations with melancholy f ind here au addit ional bas isin the identification of that phantasmaric incorporation of the melancholic libidowith the homophagic meal made of that deposed monarch of the Golden Age."

NotesJ, K, Ah ra h "m , "Notes on the, Psyr-hn-Annlyrica l Inves tiga tions and Treatment o f Man ic -

Depressive Insanity and Allied Condition,." Sl'l~rtcd Pap,'rs nn Psycho-Anaiysi (London, 1927),2 . On thi s cha racter is ti c o f the fet ish nC("( )1 '( ting to Freud, sec chapter 6 o f 'hi s volume ,3 , On the l inks between cnnniha li sm and melanchoha , see the Nouvcl l R l",I(, d c P sy cl um at ys c 6

(1972), on the top ic "DestillS du cannihnlisme,"


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C hap ter 5The Phantasrns of Eros

In his essay "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud barely hints at the eventualphantasmatic cha racter of the melancholic process, observing that the revoltagainst the loss of the loved object can be so intense that a turning away fromreali ty takes place, a clinging to the object through the medium of a hal lucinatorywishful psychosis." J It is necessary therefore to refer to his "A MetapsychologicalSupplement to the Theory of Dreams" (which, with the essay on melancholiapublished with it, was to have formed part of the projected volume of Prepara-tions/or a Metapsychologyv to find sketched, next to an ana lysis of the mecha-nism of the dream, an investigation into the process through which the phan-thorns of desire manage to elude that fundamental institution of the ego, thereali ty tes t, and penet rate into consciousness . According to Freud, in the devel -opment of psychic l ife, the ego passes through an in it ia l stage inwhich i tdoes notye t dispose of a faculty that will pe rmit it to diffe rentiate rea l from imaginaryperceptions:

At the beginning of our mental life we did in fact hallucinate thesatisfying object when we fe lt the need for it. But in such a situation.satisfac tion did not occur, and this failure must very soon have movedus to create some contrivance with the help of which it was possible todist inguish such wishful percept ions from a real ful fi llment and toavoid them for the future. In othe r words, we gave up hallucinatorysatisfaction of our wishes at a very early period and set up a kind of" real ity- test ing. " ( ' 'Metapsychological Supplement" 231)In certain cases, however, the reality test can be evaded or temporarily set

22

THE PHANTASMS OF EROS rJ 23aside. This is wha t occurs during the ha lluc ina tory psychoses of desire , whichpresent themse lves as a reaction to a Joss, aff irmed by reality, but which the egomust deny because i t f inds the loss unbearable:

The ego then breaks i ts 1 inkto reali ty and withdraws i t.s own inves tmentto the conscious system of pe rceptions. It is through this distortion ofthe real that the rea lity test is avoided and the phanta sms of desire , notremoved, but perfect ly conscious , can penet rate into the consciousnessand come to be accepted as a super ior rea lity.Freud, who in none of his wr itings elaborates a properorganic theory of the

phantasm v does not specify wha t part the phanta sm pl8y~ in the dynamic of mel-ancholic introjection. Nevertheless, an ancient and tenacious tradition consideredthe syndrome of black bile to be so closely tied to a morbid hypertrophy of theimaginative (or phantasmatic, phantastic) faculty that only if situated within thefundamenta l complex of the medieva l theory of the phantasm could all of its a s-pects be understood. It is probable that contemporary psychoanalysis, which hasreeva lua ted the role of the phantasm in the psychic processes and which seemsintent on consider ing itself, always more explicitly, as a general theory of thephanta sm. would f ind a useful point of ref erence in a doc tr ine that, many centu-l ies previously, had conceived of Eros as an essential ly phantasmat ic process andhad prepared a large place in the life of the spirit for the phanrasm. Medievalphanrasmology was born from a convergence between the Aristotelian theory ofthe imagination and the Neopla tonic doctrine of the pneuma as a vehicle of thesoul, between the magical theory of f ascination and the medical theory of theinfluences between spi ri t and body. According to th is mul ti form doctr inal com-plex, which is found already various ly enuuciated in the pseudo-Aris to telianTheologia, in the Liber de spiri tn e t anima of AIche r, and in the De insomniis ofSynesius, the phantasy (phantasiknn pneuma, spiritus phantasticusv is conceivedas a kind of subtle body of the soul tha t, situated a t the extr eme point of the sen-s itive soul, receives the images of objects , forms the phantasms of dreams, and,indeterminate circumstances , can separate i tself f rom the body and establi sh su-pernatural contacts and visions. In addition the phantasy is the seat of a stra l in-fluences, the vehicle of magical influences, and, as quid medium betweencorporeal and incorporeal , makes it possible to account for a whole series of phe-nomena otherwise inexplicable, such as the act ion of maternal des ire on the ' ' softmatter" of the fetus , the appar it ion of demons , and the effect of sexual fantasieson the genital member. The same theory also permi tted an explanation of the gen-esis of love; it is not possible, in particular, to understand the amorous ceremonialth at the troubadour lyr ic and the poe ts of the" dolce sril novo" (sweet new style)left as a legacy to modern Western poetry unless notice is taken that since itsor igins th is ceremonial presented i tsel f as a phantasmatic process . Not an exter-nal body, but an internal image, that i s, the phantasm impressed on the phantas ticsp ir it s by the gaze, i s the origin and the object of fal ling in love; only the atten tive


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24 U THE PHANTASMS OF EROS

elaborat ion and immodera te contemplat ion of this phantasrnat ic mental s imu-lacrum were held capable of generat ing an authent ic amorous passion. AndreasCappellanus, whose De alii ore is considered the' exemplary theorization ofcourtly love, thus defines love as the "immcderata cogitatio" (immoderatecontemplat ion) of the interior phantasm, and adds tha t "ex sola cogi tat ione . ..passio jJla procedi t" ("passion derives . .. from contemplat ion alone").It should be no surprise then, given the fundamental pert inence of the black

bi le in the erot ic process, tha t the melancholic syndrome should have been sincei ts origin t radi tional ly joined to phantnsmat ic prac tice. The "Imaginationesmalae"(wicked phantasies) have long appeared in the medica l l ite ra ture amongthe "signa melaucoliae" (signs of melancholy) in such an eminent posit ion thati tcan be sa id tha t the atrabi l ious disease configures it se lf e ss en ti al ly , a cc or din g tothe expression of the Padnan doctor Girolamo Mercuria le , as a " v it iu m c or ru pt aeimaginationis" (fault of corrupt imaginanon)." Already Ramon Llull mentionedthe affinity between melancholy and the imaginative faculty, specifying that thes at ur ni ne " a 1 0 11 g o a cc ip iu nr per ymaginacionem, quae cum melancolia maiorernhabet concordiam quam cum alia comp1eccione" (perceive from afar through theimagination, which has greater agreement with melancholy than withother com-plexions), In Alber tus Magnus we f ind that melanchol ies "rnul ta phantasmatainveniunt" (make up many phantasms) because dry vapor holds images morefi rmly, But once again, however , it i s in Fic ino and in Florent ine Neoplatonismthat the capacity of b lack bi le tohold and fix the phantasms was asserted f rom theperspective of a medical-magical-philosophical theory that explicitly identifiesthe amorous contemplation of the phantasm with melancholy, whose pertinenceto the erotic process here finds i ts reasons for being precise ly in an except ionalphantasmatic disposition. If one thus reads in the Theologia platonica that mel-anchol ics "because of the earthy humor fix the phan tasy more stably and moreefficaciously with their desires," in the passage quoted in chapter 3 hom Ficino'sDe amore i t Is the obsessive and exhausting hastening of the vi ta l spir its aroundthe phantasm impressed in the fantastic spir its tha t characterizes, a t once, theerot ic process and the un leashing of the ar rabi lious syndrome. In this context ,melancholy appears essential ly as an erot ic process engaged in an ambiguouscommerce with phantasms; and the double polarity, demonic-magic and angelic-contemplat ive, of the nature of the phantasm is responsible not only for the mel-ancholies' morbid propensity for necromantic fascination but also for their apti-tude for ecstatic illumination.

The influence of this conception, which indissolubly bound the saturnine tern-pcramenr to commerce with the .phantasm, quickly extended i tsel f beyond i tsoriginal range. It is still evident, for example, in a passage of the Trattato dellanobilu: della pittura of Romano Alber ti , f requent ly c ited in regard to the historyof the concept of melancholy. More than four centuries before psychoanalysis,this passage bid the foundations for a theory of art understood as a phantasrnatioperation:

THE PHANTASMS or EROS 0 25Painters become melanchol ies because, wishing to imitate, they mustre tain the phantasms f ixed in the intellect , so tha t af te rward they canexpress them in the way they first saw them when present; and, beingtheir work, this occurs no r only once , but cont inual ly, They keep theirminds so much abstracted and separated from nature that consequentlymelancholy derives f rom it. Aristotle says, however, that this signifiesgenius and prudence, because almost al l the ingenious and prudent havebeen melancholics.:'The traditional association of melancholy with artistic activity finds its justi-

fication precisely i.nthe exacerbated phantasmatic practice that constitutes theircommon trai t. Both place themselves under the sign of the spiritus phantastirus,the subtle body that not only furnishes the vehicle of dreams, of love, and Ofmagical influence, bu t which also appears closely and enigmatically joined to thenoblest creations of human culture. If this is t rue , then i t i s a lso significant thatone of the texts in which Freud lingers longest in his analysis of the "wishfulphantasies" should be the essay "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," inwhich he attempts to delineate a psychoanalyt ic theory of art is tic creat ion andformulates a hypothesis according to which the work of art would be, in somemanner , a cont inuat ion of infant ile p lay and of the unconfessed but never aban-doned phantasmatic practice of the adult.At this point , we can begin to sec the region whose spiri tual configurat ion wasthe object of an it inerary tha t, having begun on the traces of the noonday demonand its infernal retinue, has led us to the winged genius of Durer 's melancholyand in whose domain the ancient tradi tion crystal lized in this emblem can per-haps f ind a new foundation. The imaginary loss that so obsessively occupies themelancholic tendency has no real object, because its funereal strategy is directedto the impossible capture of the phantasm. The lost object is but the appearnneetha t desire Creates for its own cour ting of the phantasm, and the int roject ion oftile libido is only one of the facets of a process in which what is real loses itsreality so that what is unreal may become real. If the external world is in factnarcissistically denied to the melancholic as an object oflove, the phantasm yetreceives from this negation a reality principle and emerges from the mute interiorcrypt in order to enter into a new and fundamental dimension. No longer a phan-tasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjection opens aspace that is ne ither the halluc inated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the in-different world of natural objects. In this intermediate epiphanic place, located inthe no-man's-land between narcissistic self-love and external object-choice, thecrea tions of human cul ture wil l be situa ted one day , the interweaving (entrebes-car) of symbolic forms and textual practices through which man enters in contactwith a world that is nearer to him than any other and from which depend, moredirec tly than f rom physical na ture, his happiness and h is misfortune . The locusscvcrus (austere place) of melancholy, which according to Aristotle signifies ge-nius and prudence, is a lso the {IIS!!S SCl'erus ( serious play) of the word and of the


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symbol ic forms through which , according to Freud, man succeeds in "enjoying[his] own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame" ("Creative Writers"153). The topology of the unreal that melancholy designs in its immobile dialec-t ic is , a t the same t ime, a topology of cul ture ."It is not surprising, in this perspective, that melancholy should have been

identified by the alchemists with Nigredo (blackness), the first stage of the GreatWork , which consis ted, according to the ancient spagyri tic maxim, in giving abody to the incorporea l and rendering the corporeal incorporeal ." In the spaceopened by i ts obstinate phantasmagoric tendency or igina tes the unceasing al-chemical effort of human cul ture to appropriate to i tsel f dea th and the negativeand to shape the maximum reali ty seizing on the maximum unreal ity.If we turn now to the engrav ing of Durer (sec figure 1), it is entirely fitting to

the immobi le winged f igure intent on i ts own phantasms, and at whose side sitsthe spiritus phantasdcus" represented in the form of a cherub, that the instru-ments of the act ive l ife should l ie abandoned on the ground, having become thecipher of an enigmat ic wisdom. The troubl ing alienat ion of the most familia r ob-jec ts is the price paid by the melanchol ic to the powers that are custodians of theinaccessible . The medi tat ing angel is not , according to an interpre tat ion by nowtradi tional. the symbol of the impossibi li ty for geometry (or for the arts based onit ) to reach the incorporea l metaphysical world but , on the contrary, the emblemof man's a ttempt , at the limi t of an essential psychic r isk, to give body to his ownphantasies and to master in an art ist ic pract ice what would otherwise beirnpos-sible to he seized or known. The compass, the sphere, the millstone, the hammer ,the scales , and the straightedge , which the melanchol ic project has emptied oftheir habitual meaning and transformed into images of its own mourning, have noother significance than the space tha t they weave dur ing the epiphany of the un-at tainable. Since the lesson of melancholy is that only what is ungraspable cantruly be grasped, the melanchol ic a lone is at his leisure among these ambiguousemblematic spoi ls . As the re lics of a pnst on which iswri tten the Edenic c ipher ofinfancy, these objects have captured forever a gleam of that which can be pos-sessed only with the provision that i t be lost forever .

NotesI . FH)m "Mourning and Melanchol ia ," The Stnnr lan! Edi ti on of r il e C()ml 'l er~ Psychological

W() rk " of Sigm,md Freud, vol , 14 (London : Hogar th Press, 1957), 244 . Subsequen t t rnns la rions o fP'''"gcs fIX'''' Freud's e8""Y' t ha t appea r w ith pgc r eferences a rc a lso f rom thi s sou rce; undocu-men l"d t rans la tions a re the t rans la to r' s own .

2. S ee G. Tan fan i, " II conc cr ro d i mehn col ia ne l '500," Rrvist di storia delle scicn: mrdiche natnrnli, Florence (July-Dccctnbcr 1948).

3. The mannerist theory of the " inner design" must be placed against (he bnckground of thispsychological doctrine in order 10 be fully intelligible.

4 . The topolog ical ope ra rion o f mcbncho!y can be rep re sented in the , fo llowing schcn1: :l :

THE PHANTASMS OF EROS 027

wher e P ~ ph ant a~ rn , () .~ , ex te rnn l ob je ct , and 1 :& = unrea l objec t, The space they demarca te i s thesymbolic top'" of rnclanrhr.ly.

5. A l l i ll us tr at io n i ll t he f ir st R ip le y S c ro w lc , painted a t L u b ec k in 1 588 (Ms. Add. Sloane. 5025 ,Hritish Museum). shows the alchemist ~IS a m,-'!anC,holic by \vay of reprr.seTltll1g th e f ir st pha se of thealcbcmical work.

6. A s y st em a ti c r ev is io n o f t he iconographic interpretat ion o f Panofsky end Saxl was not amongthe thema ti c objec ts o f thi s e ssay : never theles s i t i~ impossible not tob r ing into relief here the aspectso f tha t intcrprctut ion tho ( have been gradual ly b rongh! into quest ion in the cou rse ofth i~ study, whichins derived i t ' S domain an d it s meas ure pr ec is el y f rom an i nc es san t co nf ron ta ti on wit hDu rer 's em-bl em The g re at est inn ova ti on o f t hi s pr ese nt st udy is t o have rc si rua te d t he me"bn chol ic s ynd romeag ai nst t he ba ckgr ou nd of t he med ie val an d Rcna is va nce t heo ry of the spiritlls phantasticns (melan-cho ly , in the s tr ic t sense , WoS hut ildisorder of the phantasrnatic activity, it "vi tiun , cor rnptae imag-inarionis ") and to have consequen tly returned i t to the con text o f the. t heory o f love [as the phanrasmwas , a r o nc e, I he obj ec t an d ve hi cl e of fh e ac t o f fa ll in g In love, and rove i ts el f a f orm of s(I/;ritlJ(jomrlanchoiira (me lancho ly d il igencc j] . The a ff in ity between imagina tion and melancholy tempera -ment is recognized by Panofsky and Sax!' insofar 0S i t i $exp li ci lly a ff irmed in th e t ex t o f Agr ippa onwhich the ir int erpretat ion i s based , hut it i~ in no way pursued.

The f ir st consequence tha t. on the iconograpbica l p lant ', der ives f rom the l ink between the imageproduced by DUrer and the theory o f [he ph"nl "~m, i,t ha I the winged (homh (pm,,) cunnot be iden-tif ied ;Iny longer wirh Brauch, "Praclice-.' Klein, "who saw in the drawing ~'herub-a personification ofdqwing.Ir1e.'igl1 ! . "Sa tnrne : c ro ya nc es e t 'Y1l1bole,." in Mercure d,. Pr{I"CC (1964): 588-94; reprintedin L(I [onne ct /'imdUgibfc (Paris, 1970). 224-3fll. had already noticed the lack of congruence be-tween the sma il w inged f igure and Pract ice, which should have been log lc"l ly rep re sented bUnd andwithout w ings" The ; :h er ll b r n oy h e "'itobly i de nt if ie d w it h t he spirilll" l'/t(lnm'liNIY depicted i n th e(l et of imp ri nt in g t he pha nt asm i n the phantasy, Thi .' ; exp la in s whv Dil re rl s che rub undoubted ly be-longs t o t he i co nog rap hi c ty pe of th e erotes: spiritus phontnsticus is, as we have seen. (he magicvehicle of love "nd belo"gs to the same bmil)' as the " spiritelli darnore" (li tt le love-spirits) ofStilnovi,t lyric.

The semant ic ro ta ti on th at th e phantamwlogicaJ perspective effects all Durer'simage, from as ta ti c l im it ( the inabi li ty o f geometry (0 r each J l1c1aphysics ) to a d ia lect ical one ( the a tt emp t o f therhm1ti"lSy to rO~::;(,8~ the.unattainable]. also permits us to understnnd correctly the meaning of the batholding the scroll \ \_ 'i ththe inscriprion 'I\1ckncolia L " Thi s CiH1 be conside red an authcnt rc minoremblem th~lt holds the- k ey t o rh c la rgc r embt em t hat co nta in s i t. I n th e Hicrngl'phira of Hompullo( see f igure 2 ). th e b at in flight is interpreted as representing m a n' s a tt em p t. t o boldly t ranscend themisery o r i lL 'cond it ion hy dar ing the impossible: "Jmlwc il lu !T l hominem [as r iv ientcrn ramen e t au-dac il .l~ a liqu id mol ientcm , cum monsr ra re vclne rinr , vcrpe rt it ione rn p ingunt . Haec enim ers i a la s nonh;lhe(l\"volare tarnen conatur ' (When Ihey wis he d to s how weak l in d want on man, b ut more d ari ng;md a tt empt ing something . they paint the hat . For thi s c rcaturc, a lthough l :t ck ing wings , a tt empts tofly).

A no th er im po rta nt in no va tio n r ha r h ~s e me rg ed ~ 'n tb c c ou rs e o f this s tu dy i s th e feevnluatioo oft he r ol e of t he pa tr is ti c rhe ori vn ri on of rristitia (1rw/ia (whi ch Pa nof sk y in ter pr et s simpl y as " the


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28 0THE PHANTASMS OF EROS

gui lty s leep o f the lnzy") in t il e gcn t, i~ o f tbc Ecnai s; ;1 I1Ce doc tr ine o f me lancho ly , A , we have seen,not onl y i s tristitirt-acedia not identified with bziness in patri st ic thought , but i t has the same am"biguous polarity (IriHilil! saililifr:m-ll-istili(l mori((cm) t ha t cha racter izes the Renai ssance concepto f m e l a n ch o ty .

Part IIIn the W orld of O dradek:T he W ork of Art C onfrontedw ith th e C ommo dity


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Chapter 6Freud; Of, The Absent Object

In 1927 a brief ar ticle appeared in the lnternationa!c Zeitschrift jilr Psychoanatyse(vol. 13) with the title "Fetischismus." It is one of the rare texts in which Freudposed thematical ly the problem of those individuals "whose objec t-choice wasdominated by a fetish." IThe results furnished by the analyses in the cases heobserved seemed so concordant and unequivocal that they persuaded him to con-clude that all cases of fetishism could be reduced to a single explanation. Ac-cording to Freud, the fet ishist ic fixa tion ar ises f rom the refusal of the male chi ld.to acknowledge the absence of the penis of the female (of the mother). Con-fronted with the perception of this absence, the child refuses [Freud used the termYerleugnung (disavowalj] to admit its reality, because to do so would permit athreat of castration against his own penis. The fetish is therefore the "substitutefo r the woman' s ( the mother's) penis that the l it tle boy once believed in and-forreasons familia r to us-e-does not want to give up" (152-53),Nevertheless, according to Freud, the sense of this Vcrleugnnng i snot as sim-

ple as i t might seem and in fac t impl ies ao essent ia l" ambigui ty. In the confl ictbetween the perception of reality, which urges him to renounce his phantasm, andthe counterdesire, which urges him to deny his perception, the child docs neitherone nor the other; or, rather , he does both simul taneously, reaching one of thosecompromises that are possible only under the rule of the laws of the unconscious.On the one hand, with the help of a particular mechanism, he disavows the evi-dence of his perception; on the other, he recognizes its reality, and, through aperverse symptom, he assumes the anguish he feels before it.The fetish, whethera part of the body or an inorganic object , i s, therefore, a t one and the same t ime,the presence of that no thingness that is the maternal penis and the sign of i ts ab-

3J


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32 (J THE ABSENT OBJECr

sence. Both symbol of something and its negation, the fetish can maintain itse lfonly thanks to an essential l acerat ion in which two contrary react ions consti tu tethe nucleus of an authentic f rac ture of the ego (ichspoltHl1g).It is interes ting to observe how a mental process of feti sh is tic type is implici t'

in one of the most common tropes of poetic language: synecdoche (and in itsclose relative. metonymy). The substi tu tion , in synecdoche, of par t for whole (orof a contiguous object for another) corresponds . in fet ish ism, to the subst itut ionof one part of the body (or of an object annexed to it) for the whole sexual par t-ner . That we a re not dealing with a superf icial ana logy is proved by the fact tha tthe mc ro n ym ic s u bs ti tu ti on is not exhausted in the pure and simple subst i tut ion ofone te rm for another: the s u bs ti tu te d t er m i s, rather , a t once negated and evokedby the subs ti tu tion through a process whose ambigui ty closely recal ls the Freud-ian verleugnung, and it is precisely f rom this kind of "negative re fer ence" tha tthe peculiar poetic character that invests the word arises. The fetishist ic characterof the phenomenon becomes evident in tha t particula r kind of metonymic oper-ation that, s ince Vasari and Condivi f irst gave i t crit ical recognit ion with respectto the "unfinished" sculp tures of Michelangelo , has become one of the essentialstylistic instruments of modern a rt: the nonfinished.r Gilpin, who pushed thepre-Romantic tas te for the nonfinishcd to the point of proposing the pa rtial de-struc tion of Palladiau villas so as to transform them into ar tific ia l ruins, had be-come 8WAre t h at what he ca lled the "Iaconisrn of genius" consis ted preci sely in"giving a pa rt fo r th e whole." Schlegel, to whom we owe the prophetic affir-mation that "many works of the ancients have become fragments, and manyworks of the moderns are fragments at thei r b ir th , " thought , as did Novalis , thatevery finite work was necessar ily subjec t to a limit tha t only the fr agment couldtranscend. I t i s superfluous to recal l that, in thi s sense, almost all modern poemsafter Mallarme arc fragments, in that they allude to something (the absolutepoem) that can never be evoked in i ts integri ty , but only rendered present throughi ts negat ion." The difference with respect to normal linguist ic metonymy is thatthe substituted object (the "whole" to which the f ragment a lludes) is, like thematernnl penis , nonexis tent or no longer existent , and the noufini shed thereforereveals i tsel f as a perfect and punctual pendant of the feti sh is t denial,

Analogous remarks can be formulated for me taphor, which Ortega y Gasset,in a book of ten c ited but ra re ly read, conside red "the most r adica l instrument ofdehumanization ' of modern art . As Ortega noted , metaphor subst itutes one thingfor another , not so much in order to reach the second, a s to escape from the first.If it is true , a s it has been argued, that the metaphoric substitute is originally anominal replacement for an objec t tha t should not be named, then the ana logywith fet ishi sm is even s tronger than in the case of metonymy. 4 Given that Freudwas s imply attempting to t race the phenomenon of fet ish ism to the unconsciousprocesses that constituted its or igin, we cannot be surprised tha t he did not un-duly-preoccupy himself with the consequences that the ambiguity of the infantil eYerleugnung might have on the status of the fe tish object, or that he neglected to

THE ABSENT OBJECT 0 33

put this object in rela tion to the othe r objects tha t make up the world of humancul ture insofar as i t i s an act iv ity ' that creates objects ."Considered from this point of view, the fetish confronts us with the paradox of

an unattainable object that sat is fies a human need preci sely through it s being un-attainable. Insofar as it is a presence , the fetish objec t is in f ac t something con-c rete and tangible; but iusofa r as it is the presence of an absencc .jt is, at the samet ime, immater ial and intangible, because i t alludes continuously beyond i tsel f tosomething that can never really he possessed .

This essential ambiguity in the status of the feti sh perfect ly explains a fact thatobservation had already revealed some t ime ago, that i s, that the fet ishi st unfai l-ingly tends to collect and multiply fe t ishes.PWhether the object of pervers ion bean article of lingerie of a cer tain kind or a sma ll leathe r boot or a woman's headof hair, the perver se subjec t will be equally satisfied (or, if you wish, equallyunsat is fied) by all the objects that present the same character is ti cs . P reci sely be-cause the fetish is a negation and the sign of an absence, it is not an unrepea tableunique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution,without any of i ts success ive incarnations ever succeeding in exhaust ing the nul-lity o f which it is the symbol . However much the fetishist multiplies proofs of itspresence and accumula te s harems of objects, the fetish will inevitably remainelusive an d celebrate, in each of i ts appar it ions , always and only i ts own mysticalp h ant as r na g or ia . .

The fetish revea ls a new an d disturbing mode of being of objec ts, of the [ac-ticia manufactured by human efforts." However br ie f our conside ra tion of thephenomenon, we realize that it i s more famil iar than we first imagined.

ScholiaThe birth offetishismL From "Fetishism." The Standard Edit ion of (he Complete Psychological

Works (if Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. and ed . James Strachey (London: Ho-garth Press, 1961), 152.

The first to use the tern] fet ishism to des ignate a sexual pervers ion was AlfredBinet, whose study Lefetichisme dans l'amour (Paris, 1888) was attentively readby Freud dur ing the pe riod of his composition of Three Essays on the 'Theory ofSexllality (1905). "Such substitute s," Freud writes with Bine t's words in mind,"are. with some jus tice l ikened to the feti shes in which savages bel ieve that thei rgods are embodied" (Standard Edition, vol . 7 , 153). The psychological conno-tations of the term are more famil iar to us today than the original rel ig ious mean-ing, which appeared for the f irst t ime in the work of Charles de Brosses, Du cu lt edes dicux fe ticbes , au parallele de I'ncicnne religion de I 'Egypte avec 11.1eli-gion actuelle de Nigritie (Paris. 1760). Neither Restif de la Breronne [whose Piedde Fanchette Ofl ie soulier coulcur de rose (ranchette's foot, or the pink slipper),center ing on shoe fe tishism, appeared only nine year s a fter de Brosses's study]


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34 U THE ABSENT OBJECT

nor the Marquis de Sade, although they both mentioned numerous cases of sexual"Ietishism" in their works, used this term, Even Charles Fourier, who, in thechapter 011 erotic manias in his Le nOU'('(11( monde amoureux, several times men-t ioned the case of a heel fet ishist (a "mania" wor thy, according to the author, ofthe "Golden Age") did not use the word fet ish. It should be noted that along withthe diffusion of the psychoanalyt ic use of the term, anthropologists, who had ac-cepted the term proposed by de Brosses, gradually abandoned it in response tothe str ict disapproval of Mauss (according to whom "the not ion of fe tish ought todisappear completely from science").The nonfinished2. Giorgio Vasari, speaking of the Virgin in the Medici Chapel, writes that

"although its parts are not finished, one recognizes ... in the imperfection ofthe sketch the per fec tion of the work"; and Condivi , in regard to the sculpturesof the New Sacristy, states, "nor does the rough sketch stand in the way of theperfection and beauty of the work" [see Renate Bonelli, "II non-finite di Mi-chelangiolo" and Piero Sanpaolesi, "Michelangelo e il non-fini te" i ll Atti delConvcgno di studi tnichelangioleschi (Rome: Edi tore dell ' Ateneo, 1966)] . Onthe nonfinished in art and l ite ra ture see a lso the vo lume of essays Das Unvollcn-dete als kunstlcrische Form (The unf inished as ar tis tic form), edi ted by J. AdolfEisenwer th (Bern: Francke , 1959), and the acute observations of Edgar Wind inArt and Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 19(3).Absolute poetry

3. "But of what do I properly speak, when from this direction, in this direc-tion, with these words, I speak of a poetry - no, of poetry? I speak, yes, of thepoetry that does not exist!

"Absolute poetry-no, certainly i t does not exist , i t cannot exist !"But it does exist, yes, in every existing poem, it exists in every poem with-

out pretense, this question that cannot be evaded, this unheard-of pretense" [PaulCelan, Der meridian, in Ausgewahlte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1970)].Metaphor and perversion4. Ortega 's defini tion of metaphor might wel l refer to the fet ishist Verieug-nung: "A strange thing, indeed, this human mental activity of replacing one thing

for another -not so much out of haste to reach the lat ter as out of determinationto escape the former." The theory or metaphor as a "substitutive name" for ataboo is found in Heinz Werner, Die Urspriing der Metapher (The origin of met-aphor) (1919) . The analogy of sexual perversions and metaphor was noted, withhis usual acumen, by Kraus: "There are metaphors in the erot ic language aswel l.The illiterate call them perversions. "Objects of fetishism

5. Even recently, in the issue of the Nouvelle Revue de Psychallalyse entitledObjets dufetichisme (vol. 2, 1970), only two of the psychoanalysts contributing

THE ABSENT OBJECT 035to the volume appeared to realize, though but fleetingly, the possible implicationsof the phantornatic status of the fetish object, suggestively characterized as objetde perspective (perspective object) or objet de manque (object o f lack) , or toper-ceive the closeness of the fetish object to the domain of cultural creation. SeeGuy Rosolato, "Le fe tichisme dont se derobe 1objet" (The fe tishism whose ob-ject disappears), and V. N. Smirnoff' , "La transaction fetichiquc" (The fetishisttransaction).The collector6. As Krafft-Ebing records, actual warehouses of braids and shoes were found

in the dwellings of the "bra id-cut ter s" or of the shoe fe tishists. In this sense, thefetishist displays many resemblances with a figure not usually l is ted among per -verts: the collector. What the collector seeks in the object is something absolutelyimpalpable to the noncol lector , who only uses or possesses the objec t, just as thefet ish does not coinc ide in any way with the objec t in its material aspect .Etymology

7. The Portuguese word feiticio ( from which the word fe tish is coined) doesnot derive, as de Brosses thought , f rom the Latin root offatum,fari,fanum (withthe meaning, therefore, of "enchanted thing") bu t from the LatinjaClicius ("ar~ti flc ial"), from the same root asfaeere. Saint Augustine even referred to a genus[acticiorum deorum with regard to the pagan idols, where the term [acticiussurely anticipates the modern meaning. The Indo-European root *dhe- of [acereis linked with that of [as, [anum, feria and has an original ly rel igious value,which can stil l be perce ived in the archaic sense of facere ("make a sacrifice").See Alfred Ernout and Alphonse Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de fa languelatine, s.v. "facio" and "feriac." In this sense, everything that isfactitious be-longs by rights to the religious sphere, and the astonishment of de Brosses beforethe fe tish not only has /10 reason to exist, it betrays a forgetfulness of the originalstatus of objects.


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Chapter 7Marx; orr The Universal Exposition

In 1925, two years before the publ icat ion of Freud's art icle on fet ishism, RainerMaria Rilke, in a letter toWitold von Hulewicz (particularly important for Rilke'sattempt to explain what he had expressed poetically in the Duino Elegies), re-vealed his apprehension before what was according to him a change in the statusof objects:

Even. for our grandparents a "house;" a "well," a familiar tower, theirvery clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate;almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added tothe store of the human. Now, from Amer ica, empty indifferent thingsare pouring across, sham things, dummy life ... A house, in theAmerican sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, hasnothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which wentthe hopes and ref lec tions of OU1 ' forefathers ... Live things, thingslived and conscient of us, are runningout and can no longer bereplaced. We are perhaps the last still fo have known such things.[Lettcrs of Rainer Maria Ri lke, vol . 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947),374-75; emphasis in the original] 'In the fourth part of the first chapter of Capital, which has the title "The Fe-

t ishism of the Commodity and I ts Secre t," Marx is explici tly concerned with thist ransformation of the products of human labor into "appearances of things," ina "plwntasmagoria ... that is subject, and also not subject, to the senses":

A commodity appears at f ir st s ight an extremely obvious, t rivial thing.. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it,

3 6

THE UNIVERSAL EXPOSITION 037

whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties itsat isfies human needs, or tha t it fi rs t takes on these propert ies as theproduct of human labour, It i s abso lutely c lear tha t, by his ac tivi ty, manchanges the forms of the materials of nature in such .a way as to makethem useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a tableis made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, anordinary, sen~U01JSthing. But (IS soon as i t emerges as a commodi ty, itchanges into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only standswith its feet on (he ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, its tands on its head, and evo lves out of i ts wooden brain grote~q\ le ideas,far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.[Capital. vel . 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977),163-64]This ' 'mystica l charac ter" tha t the product of labor acquires as soon as i t takes

on the form of the commodi ty depends, according to Marx , on an essent ial dou-bl ing of the relat ion to the objec t, for which the product does not now representonly a use-value (its suitability to satisfy a determinate human need), but thisuse-value is, a t the same time, the material substrate of something else: the ex-change value. Since the commodity presents itself under this double form of use-ful object and bearer of value , i t is an essent ial ly immaterial and abstract piece ofgoods, whose concrete enjoyment is impossible except through accumulation andexchange:In obvious contrast wi th the mater ia lity of the body of the commodi ty,not a single atom of matter penetrates to its value ... Metamorphosedinto identical subl imates, samples of the same undif ferent iated labor, a llobjects manifest but one thing, which is that a certain force of labor hasbeen expended in producing them. Insofar as they are crystals of thiscommon social substance , they are reputed to be value.This doubling of the product of work, which presents us now with one face

now with another, wi thout making both visible in the same instant , consti tuteswhat Marx cal ls the "fet ishist ic charac ter" of the commodi ty. The commoditythus presents more than a simply terminological analogy with the fetishes that areobjects of perversion, The super imposit ion of the use-value corresponds, in fe-tishism, to the superimposition of a par ticular symbol ic value on the normal useof the objec t. Just as the fe tishist never succeeds in possessing the fe tish whol ly,because i t i s the sign of two contrad ic tory real ities , so the owner of a commodi tywill never be able to enjoy it simul taneously as both useful object and as value:the material . body in which the commodi ty is manifest may be manipulated in a llmanner of ways, (Inti i t may be materially al tered sofar as todestroy i t, but in thisdisappearance the commodity will once again reaffirm. its unattainability.The fe tish izat ion of the objec t effec ted by the commodi ty becomes evident in

the Universal Expositions. which Walter Benjamin defined as "pilgrimage-sites


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38 0 THE UNIVERSAL EXPOSlTIONof the commodity-fetish." Marx. was in London in 1851 when the first UniversalExposition, in Hyde Park, Was inaugurated with great fanfare, and it is probablethat his memory of tha t occasion contributed toh is reflec tions on the character ofthe commodi ty- fe tish. The "phantasmagoria" of which he speaks in re lat ion tothe commodity C81l be discovered in the intentions of the organizers, who chose,from 81TIOnghe various possibilities presented, Paxton's project for an enormouspalace constructed ent irely out of glass. The Guide to the Paris Exposition of1867 re ite ra ted the supremacy of this phantasmagorica l charac ter: "The publ icneeds a grandiose concept that will str ike its imagination; its spirit musthalt, as-tonished, before the marvels of industry. It wishes to conrernplat an enchantedscene (un coup d'oeil feerique) and not similar products, uniformly grouped."The postcards of the per iod increased the effect even more, swathing the build-ings o

Agamben, G.

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