Erotic Fantasy. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

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      In the course of progress, the alienation of the body evolved into a hostile estrangement. The body with its variety of senses, passions, and desires was clamped into a rigid framework of commandments and taboos and was made into a simple “mute servant” through a series of repressive measures. Therefore, it needed to regain its value in an alternative way.

      This estrangement consisted of an unstoppable process of abstraction, of the ever growing estrangement of people not only from their own bodies, but also from other people’s bodies. The progress in the name of conquering nature in the past two centuries has increasingly led to the destruction of nature, and not only in the external world, but also in the inner nature of man. The dominion of people over nature led at the same time to dominion over human nature. The “love-hate relationship with the body” is the basis of what we call “culture”: “Only culture views the body as a thing that one can possess, only in the context of culture did the body first differentiate itself from the spirit – the epitome of power and authority – as an object, a dead thing, a ‘corpus.’ In man’s devaluation of his own body, nature takes vengeance on man for reducing it to the level of an object of mastery, of raw material.”[12]

      Due to the demands of the intensification of work, discipline, and increased mental control, the body becomes increasingly transformed “…from an organ of desire into an organ of production.”[13] In accordance with the principle of division of labour, industrialised societies separated work from life, learning from work, intellectual from manual work. The result has been turning the body into a machine.

      On it own, the “freedom of sexuality” changes little in this disfigurement of the inner nature of man. “Sexuality is, at least in its modern reduction to ‘sex,’ a term too narrow to correctly describe the fullness and versatility of emotions, energies, and connections,” concludes Rudolf zur Lippe.[14] In the digital age, the body completely loses its substantial meaning. Volkssport and swinger clubs represent an attempt to reanimate the estranged body.

      In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first modern philosopher of the body, that which had been despised previously was brought to the foreground. As he first observed, the destruction of humanity in the age of capitalism began with the destruction of the body. He praised the living body as the sole carrier of happiness, joy, and self-elevation,[15] and heavily criticised the view of the body characteristic of Christian morality. “All flesh is sinful,” taught Christianity, and while it praised work, it diminished the flesh to being the source of all evil. The sinful flesh had to be subjected to the ascetic spirit. Christianity was for him “the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself.”[16]

      He replied to the “despisers of the body”: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”[17] Here the spirit would be inclined to interpret itself falsely, advises Nietzsche, to escape from the body and “use it as guide… Faith in the body is better manifested than faith in the spirit,”[18] a thesis that today is being confirmed through psychosomatic research.

      Nietzsche anticipates the psychoanalytical insight that everything having to do with soul and spirit is rooted in physical experience: “‘I’ says you, and are proud of this word. But the greater thing – in which you are not willing to believe – is your body with its great wisdom; it does not say ‘I,’ but does it.”[19]

      One needs to be wary of misunderstanding when interpreting Nietzsche, especially in the face of fascist ideology which justified its barbaric conception of man through references to his writings. “Today we are tired of civilisation”: fascism used this complaint voiced by Nietzsche to support naked violence. Such violence is exactly what the progress of civilisation that Nietzsche criticises was based on from the very beginning. The liberation of people is based not on an excess of reason and enlightenment, but, rather, on its shortage, bodily reason notwithstanding. The fascist cult of the body was only the ultimate manifestation of the process that silenced the body. Those who exalted the body in the Third Reich, “…had the same affinity with killing as the lover of nature has with hunting. They viewed the body as a movable mechanism, with the joints as hinges and the flesh as the padding of the skeleton. They related with the body and worked with their limbs as if they were already separated.”[20]

      The new Man is a body-machine: his physique is mechanised, his psyche eliminated.[21] “I am not following your path, you, the despisers of the body!” was Nietzsche’s answer to such philistines. Did the “sexual revolution” liberate the body? Only to a certain degree. Indeed, what appeared to be liberation, was often nothing more than propagation of the socially mandated self-objectification and mechanisation of the genitalia. “The so-called ‘Sex Wave’ movement addresses the needs that were banned for so long from morality and from the public sphere using the technology of mechanical production and propagation, thereby degrading those needs even more.”[22] Sexuality and erotica are no longer the expression of resistance to the ongoing process of socialisation, but rather its victims.

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