On sexual-literary "lingering" (+ more evidence Freud was a dickbag)

[breathedout]

[Kipling's 1857 Mutiny] stories are [...] carefully screened for their unspeakable horror, a horror that only the narrators [and not the readers] can wholly see and decipher. [...]

In her work on narrative obsessions and their links to fetishism, Emily Apter connects such narrative structures to a particular kind of pleasurable preoccupation: "The literary psychodynamics of vision: the conceit of seeing... heightens erotic atmosphere by placing the reader-viewer at a distance (the suspense of image-suspension) or situating him or her at some transgressively hidden vantage point. The reader is a lonely voyeur, hunched over a keyhole, and the space that separates him or her from the spectacle correlates to the temporality of lingering on the way to a sexual aim... what Freud called perversion... and what Peter Brooks (glossing Freud) has described as the protracted forepleasure of narrative 'clock-teasing'." A footnote to the above passage further points us to the section "The Sexual Aberrations" in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which Sigmund Freud places the burden of perversity on the rather elusive notion of "lingering": "Perversions are sexual activities... which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, of (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim." For Freud, these aberrant activities are problematic beginnings, preliminary stages that lose their "abnormalcy" when placed in a strongly teleological model of sexuality that must have as its endpoint the stabilizing space of heterosexual genitality. The founding split in all of Freud's revisions of these essays is his inability to account for the breakdown in such developmental models.

What happens, however, I want to ask, if this "lingering" or "fore-pleasure" supersedes the value of genitally defined pleasure, or more interestingly, what if "lingering" becomes, because of and not despite its defined incompleteness, the desired object of narrative focus?

—Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (bolding added)

So a COUPLE thoughts:

1) Freud was a fun guy in the sack, n/n/wtfn?
2) This passage just snuck up on me out of nowhere and hit me over the head with a neat little link between my predilection for queer sex and the fact that my ideal detective story would live forever in the space before/without resolution! RUDE! But also: delightful. Even if I am not totally convinced, I am utterly tickled. Lingering!
3) What a great final sentence.
4) Seriously though, my brain just keeps obsessively repeating the phrase, "the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim," but putting the emphasis on different words, à la Tumblr circa 2017:

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which SHOULD normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should NORRRRRMALLY be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be TRAVERSED [[[[[[RAPIDLY]]]]]]]] on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards ~~~THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM~~~

Ahahahahaha I mean.

*Star Trek intro voice*: Penis in vagina: THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM!

TRAVERSED RAPIDLY

Comments

[greywash]

*Star Trek intro voice*: Penis in vagina: THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM!

TRAVERSED RAPIDLY

I was sitting next to you while I read this so you know I actually did LOL but: I LOL'ed.

[breathedout]

If Freud is good for anything, I'm glad it's for bringing laughter to your otherwise kind of miserable afternoon yesterday <3

[verymorstan]

aw man, and here i was so looking forward to gettin me some intermediate relations tonight! /o\

*grins* thank you for this excellent post. it's thoughtful and hilarious, and i am grateful.

[breathedout]

Ahahaha I know, right?? I spent a good portion of the weekend getting my intermediate relations on! Only to learn it was all for naught!

(Glad you enjoyed!)

[oulfis]

A+ best use of whisperspace yet -- I audibly giggled.

[breathedout]

LOL wonderful, wonderful. I aim to please, even though pleasure is just a peripheral that should be traversed rapidly along the path to the final blogging aim.

[teaforlupin]

intermediate relations to the sexual Object which should normally be Traversed Rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final! sexual! aim!

intermediate relations to the SEXUAL OBJECT which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

[teaforlupin]

(I couldn't resist being silly, but this is genuinely interesting and very thought provoking)

[breathedout]

I can't believe I neglected to emphasize "the sexual object" in my own list! Or, as I might have written if I'd remembered it, """""""""""""""""""""""THE ~SEXUAL OBJECT~"""""""""""""""""""""""

LOL

(Glad you found the passage thought-provoking; I did too!)

[teaforlupin]

Heeeeeeeeeee

[magnetic_pole]

*Star Trek intro voice*: Penis in vagina: THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM!

Heh heh. :) Somehow mocking Freud is cosmic justice; you just *know* that humor is something that should normally be traversed rapidly on the path toward the final analytic text. M.

[breathedout]

Ahahahahahahaha WELL PLAYED

[rydra_wong]

4) Seriously though, my brain just keeps obsessively repeating the phrase, "the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim," but putting the emphasis on different words, à la Tumblr circa 2017:

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which SHOULD normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should NORRRRRMALLY be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be TRAVERSED [[[[[[RAPIDLY]]]]]]]] on the path towards the final sexual aim

intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards ~~~THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM~~~

Ahahahahaha I mean.

*Star Trek intro voice*: Penis in vagina: THE FINAL SEXUAL AIM!

Permission to metaquotes?

[breathedout]

Ahahahahaha absolutely, go for it.

[rydra_wong]

Done!

[breathedout]

Wonderful, wonderful.

[mecurtin]

No wonder he was baffled by the question "What do women want?"

[breathedout]

LOL I know, right? *Shudder*

[teaforlupin]

What do we want?

INTERMEDIATE RELATIONS!

When do we want them?

Traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim!

[breathedout]

ahahahahahahaha exaaaaactly

[starshipfox]

omg, I keep imagining what was going through Freud's head when he was actually attempting to put his penis in someone's vagina, and it's very uncomfortable. what a terrible human being.

[breathedout]

I tried to write a jokey internal monologue for boning!Freud as a response to this comment, and legitimately squicked myself out, ahahaha. And he had six kids. Gross!!

[starshipfox]

SIX. That's horrifying.

[marahmarie]

Ick.

[breathedout]

Indeed.

[donut_donut]

The stuff about lingering reminds me a lot of Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze's commentary on Masoch's Venus and Furs... I believe the term he uses there is "delay"? But it seems to be dancing around a similar concept, ie the eroticism of postponing/deferring the sexual act, possibly forever. In a way, perhaps this is the very definition of eroticism: perpetual sexiness, never coming to any completion or resolution. hmm.

I'm also tempted to defend Freud here a bit, and then have a bunch of business cards printed up: "The Last Person to Say Anything Positive About Freud", but this is probably not the place, haha. I'll just say... I've read a lot of Freud in my life, and he always strikes me as a more complex thinker than we, as a culture, remember him.

[breathedout]

I have actually had a similar experience reading Freud versus reading (or talking to) Freudians; when I read his actual work I never end up hating him as much as I expect to based on his reputation. Sadly, as with Quentin Coldwater in the books versus the TV adaptation of The Magicians, that improvement, radical as it may be, only gets me from "utter revulsion" to "mild to medium distaste." So. *Sad trombone noise*

I keep feeling like I should dive deeper into Deleuze & Guattari than the smattering I got in undergrad, & then feeling wearily that I may have kind of missed my window on having the patience for straight (as in undiluted, not as in heterosexual) philosophical theory. But maybe not! Maybe I will rally.

[donut_donut]

radical as it may be, only gets me from "utter revulsion" to "mild to medium distaste."

haha fair enough. indeed, the book that first won me over to Freud was Thomas Szasz's "Anti-Freud", which was such an unrelentingly simple-minded and transparently overcompensating attack on Freud's ideas that it... wound up accidentally legitimizing them.

I do think mid-century American intellectual culture did a great disservice to Freud... I mean the whole vogue for "analysis" that vastly oversimplified certain concepts and forced them into this heavily moralized paradigm of "illness/health" which wasn't so present in the original writings.

I would wager that Freud's point was probably not, "I have sex really fast, purely for procreative reasons, and I am Good, therefore everyone who has other kind of sex is Sick and Bad." I suspect it was more like, "Biologically speaking, it would seem that the purpose of sex is to produce babies. But nearly all humans (myself included) are super into sexy things that have nothing to do with making babies. Where does that come from? Is it biological? Is it cultural? Is it cross-cultural?" Which I think is a legitimate question that people of the time had been blushingly and not-very-successfully avoiding.

The answers that Freud came up with were sometimes a bit... haha, fanciful? But he was shooting in the dark so much of the time. And people get hung up on terms like "perversion", but I think it was less a value-judgment than it seems to us today.

(a long-winded way of saying, I think Freud may actually have been pretty kinky, lol.)

On Deleuze:
I know the absolute last thing you need right now is book recommendations! hoo boy. But for the record, Coldness and Cruelty is actually a delight to read and way more accessible than other Deleuze (especially his stuff with Guattari). It's as much lit theory as philosophy, and it's entirely about sex and power dynamics and gender and so I think would hit a lot of your intellectual buttons.

(also I am embarrassed to notice that I wrote "Venus and Furs" above, it's actually Venus in Furs, I do know that *cough cough* .

[breathedout]

I mean, on the one hand it would be unreasonable to hold Freud either responsible for or apart from the commonly-held prejudices of his time, or to pillory him on the basis of what was later done with his work by other people. On the other hand, though, it’s difficult NOT to get hung up on words like “perversion” when a big part of what his arrested development theory went on to do was, famously, to pathologize queerness, even if he himself stopped short of calling it an illness; and when that pathologization and medicalization of queerness by the psychiatric community went on to have such intensely harmful consequences for people like me in the coming century. Much like assimilationist theories of race that claimed dark-skinned people could be recuperated if they were indoctrinated into “moral” whiteness, the claim that queerness was a curable illness (or preventable aberration based on a developmental defect) rather than an evil vice might have seemed humane at the time; but the legacy of the first is still profoundly racist and the legacy of the second is still profoundly homophobic. So regardless of whether he personally liked a bit of slap & tickle, which I was maybe overly glib about above, I’ve read and personally witnessed too many first-hand accounts of 20th century queers convinced of their own sickness to be able to read past it in the early 20th century texts that were so foundational to the medicalization movement. And in the context of Arondekar’s work, which just spent 200 pages looking at texts contemporary with and predating Freud in which the word “perversion” is used at length in its non-psychiatric, non-technical sense to debase and other both the British colonial subjects at large and men who have sex with men specifically, it’s difficult to read it as value-neutral as well.

[donut_donut]

I'm sure both of us have better things to do than argue on the internet about Freud, but I do feel the need to defend myself: I am a queer person who has read Freud primarily in the context of queer and gender studies, so... whatever you think about Freud, I hope I can convince you that my apologia for him does not come from like... thinking queer people are sick perverts who need to be cured.

"the claim that queerness was a curable illness"

I agree with you that this is a terrible thing. I disagree that Freud held this position (which, again, I say not to convince you but only to explain how it is possible for me, a queer person, to consider Freud an interesting and worthwhile thinker).

[breathedout]

Yeah I wrote that reply on my phone at 5am, & didn't intend it to read like I think the set {queer people} includes me & not you. Though I can see how it would, for which I apologize.

I also wasn't exactly claiming Freud held the "curable illness" position, but rather that his language linking queerness to arrested development was quickly leveraged by the medicalization movement, and perhaps that it leant itself to being thus leveraged. It does seem like "a variation on the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development" isn't exactly a STELLAR position to hold, even on its own—though again, a man of his time & place, etc. It's just that dismissing the value weight of the term "perversion" in this context is, I think a lot to ask, when it was routinely and contemporaneously being used in a way that was not value-neutral at all.

Also, I think it's really legitimate if one queer person (you) holds a different attitude to a complicated historical figure than another queer person (me), even if Queerness as an issue is the hot button that's causing my recoil. There are certainly plenty of complicated historical figures with whom I choose to spend time, however much they might make people who are not me recoil; I'm certainly not intending to say that I don't think you should spend time with Freud.

[digsdigsdigs]

Ho boy, I'm late to this party, but I just wanted to say, this quote has been SO USEFUL to me in my current writing project! I think I need to go check out the Apter, too. I've been thinking/drafting some stuff that circles around the daydream as dissociative practice -- a little pocket desire-world, never-expressed, and this ties in so perfectly. Thanks for sharing!

[breathedout]

Oh good, I'm so glad!! I'll be interested in your thoughts if you do seek out the Apter. And, of course, in the results of your own work on the subject!