Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism

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To understand why the concept of aesthetic sexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality. Arguing against Foucault's assertions that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture while ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, Byrne suggests that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what she calls ‐aesthetic sexuality'. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, sexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic sexuality, value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality's raison d'être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents Author’s note Acknowledgments 1 Introduction Aesthetic sexuality Sadomasochism Aesthetic sexualities The question of choice Sexual subjectivity and aesthetic philosophy Book structure and matters of terminology 2 Universal perversion and the laws of judgment: the Marquis de Sade Pleasure, pain, and the libertine brain The tyranny of nature and the efficacy of machines Reasonable tastes Universal perversion Cultivation, imagination, excrement Instinctive morality/instinctive monstrosity The law without a law Parody/earnestness 3 Brutal beauty: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices Pater on art and life “The condition of strangeness” Art, class, and subjectivity Pater and Mirbeau: cross-Channel appreciations? Exquisite execution in Le Jardin des supplices Monstrosity and aristocracy Theory and artifice Voluptuous botany Scathing pleasure Alluring agony in Poems and Ballads Blood and blossoms Smiting arias Critical cadences 4 Tragic self-shattering I: Nietzsche’s aesthetics Apollo and Dionysus Dionysian sexuality Semblance and representation “A mystical sense of oneness” Explosive physiology Distortion, transformation, becoming 5 Tragic self-shattering II: delirious materialism in Bataille’s L’Érotisme and Histoire de L’oeil The sadomasochistic slant of the French avant-garde: Sade and surrealism Ideas in circulation Nietzsche: a shared inspiration Eyeing off Apollo Tragic transgression in L’Érotisme The sacred and the insane Delirious materialism Dissolution and continuity 6 Tragic self-shattering III: mortifying metaphysics in Réage’s Histoire d’O and Berg’s L’image Apollonian lust Dionysian liaisons Openness and unity Mirror images Dreams and stories 7 Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theater Replication or refusal? Sadomasochism and patriarchy in the sex wars Baudrillard and postmodern aesthetics Production Gendered artifice The law Power Perversion Pleasure Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theater Aesthetic/anti-aesthetic Sadomasochistic rule/social law Performed power/real power A ritual of choice Power’s seductive reversibility Devotion to pleasure Sadomasochism’s “true” violence: the destruction of the real 8 Conclusion: fashioning BDSM today Fetish fashion: aesthetic/erotic Commodification and aestheticization Spectacular self-fashioning Erotic semiotics The politics of style Works cited Index