(Homage to Pomona)
Jacob Jordaens, c. 1623
Oil on canvas, 180 × 241 cm
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Böhme’s analysis echoes much of contemporary feminist critique: The corporeal should be given homage only when it is united with personality, as if the body itself was something inferior.
What Böhme refers to as “phallocentrism”, can be observed even in the context of advanced cultures: the progress of civilization has been accompanied by an ever-increasing alienation of the body – this process is repeated in each stage of history.
Venus in Front of the Mirror
Peter Paul Rubens, 1624
Oil on panel, 123 × 98 cm
Collection of the prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz
The lustful preoccupation with the body is the primary interest of a child. Children are able to experience desire in the activity of their whole body to a much greater degree than adults. In adults, this original, all-consuming childhood desire is focused in one small area – the genitals.
The Toilet of Venus
Johann Liss, c. 1627
OiI on canvas, 82 × 69 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
This is how Norman O. Brown describes erotic desire in The Resurrection of the Body: “Our displaced desires point not to desire in general, but specifically to the desire for the satisfaction of life in our own body”. All morals are bodily morals. Our indestructible unconscious wishes to return to childhood.
Angelica and Medoro
Jacques Blanchard, early 1630s
Oil on canvas, 121.6 × 175.9 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This childhood fixation is rooted in the yearning for the pleasure principle, for the rediscovery of the body, which has been estranged from us by culture. “The eternal child in us is actually disappointed in the sexual act, and specifically in the tyranny of the genital phase”. It is a deeply narcissistic yearning that is expressed in the theory of Norman O. Brown.
The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus)
Diego Velázquez, 1647–1651
Oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm
The National Gallery, London
For him, psychoanalysis acts as a remedy for the disparity between body and spirit: the transformation of the man’s “I” into the bodily “I” and the resurrection of the body.
This dichotomy between body and spirit defines our culture.
The Birth of Venus
Noël-Nicolas Coypel, 1732
Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf discuss this in their study of the destiny of the body throughout history and conclude that “…the historical progress of European imprinting since the Middle Ages was made possible by the distinctively Western separation of body and spirit, and then fulfilled itself as ‘spiritualisation’ of life, as rationalising, as the devaluation of human body, that is, as dematerialisation”.
The Odalisque
François Boucher, 1735
Oil on canvas, 53.5 × 64.5 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
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.
Reclining Girl
François Boucher, 1752
Oil on canvas, 59 × 73 cm
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Therefore, it needed to regain its value in an alternative way.
This estrangement consisted of a continuous process of abstraction, of the ever growing isolation 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 power of humans over nature simultanrously influenced the power 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”. (Max Horkheimer/ Th.W.Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung) 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”. In accordance with the principle of division of labour, industrialised societies separated work from life, learning from work, intellectual from manual work.
The Three Graces
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1797–1798
Oil on canvas, 200 × 153 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Valpinçon Bather
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1808
Oil on canvas, 146 × 97 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Gothic Bathroom
Jean-Baptiste Mallet, 1810
Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 32.5 cm
Château-Musée de Dieppe, Dieppe
La Grande Odalisque
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814
Oil on canvas, 91 × 162 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The result has turned the body into a machine.
On its 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.
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