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

[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.