In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (review)

In Praise of the Whip is a translation of Niklaus Largier's Lob der Peitsche (2001). It is a book of encyclopedic scope, bringing under its purview not only the wealth of early Christian and medieval ascetic and mystical devotional literature in which flagellation occupies center stage, but also the polemics that early modernity's Reformation movements in Europe bring to bear on these practices, including their "de-mystification" into "mere" erotics; flagellation's polemical recuperation as anti-rational imaginative arousal in libertine philosophical writings; modernity's discursive capture of flagellation within medical-psychological categories of perversion, pathology, and sexuality; and, finally, the persistence of flagellation's transfigurative potential in decadentist writing and postmodern artistic practice.

The book is divided into three parts corresponding to different thematic inflections and historical understandings of flagellation across this broad span of time. Part 1, "Ascesis," lays out the devotional significance of scourging and the argument of the book, that flagellation's specificity is its ritual, and thus theatrical and performative, character, and that it is also a practice of memorialization and transfiguration, aimed at "actualizing through performance something that words cannot reach" (14). The primary texts Largier makes available are astonishing for the vivid and passionate richness of their descriptions. For this section alone, In Praise of the Whip would constitute a major contribution to the cultural history of a little understood and much denigrated activity, which, Largier notes, becomes reduced in modernity to so much erotic kink, or othered as monstrous in populist representations of extreme opus dei Catholicism. The last chapter of part 1 effects the transition to part 2, "Erotics," and presents an argument for a historical shift in attitudes toward voluntary flagellation, documented in the Protestant critiques of Jesuitical idolatry or the incarnational assumptions that liken the practice to transubstantiation's real, rather than symbolic, transformations. Largier's argument is that around 1700 a "structural bifurcation" (217) occurs, whereby the passionate arousal effected by flagellation is understood to be merely a cover for the arousal of the flesh, rather than a deliberate play on and with the ambivalence of desire as a nexus of bodily and spiritual passion. Henceforth, Largier argues, "erotic arousal becomes the 'libertine,' 'pornographic,' or 'hysterical' counterpoint to spirituality, rather than the condition of possibility of spiritual experience" (218).

Part 2 develops the theme of erotics, culminating in an argument — the least convincing, to my mind, of the book, for its insistence on the importance of images in libertine literature — about Sade's use of ritual whipping as a deterritorialization of the passions and the libertine refutation of Enlightenment efforts to rationalize desire. The persuasiveness of this argument partly depends on whether one understands Sade to be representing desire and lust, and whether the reader-spectator is aroused and/or profoundly frustrated by the imagistic withholding that is also a significant aspect of this text. Ultimately, insofar as writing, especially poetry, and whipping are both rhythmic, repetitive, ritual practices — as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously argued in "A Poem is Being Written" (Tendencies, 2003) — for Largier, "Sade's utopian scenarios of desire and lust become genuine allegories of an arousal of the imagination that rejects the control of reason" (449). The section concludes with a chapter on Swinburne and Joyce and the reputed English vice of flagellomania.

Part 3, "Therapeutics," affirms Michel Foucault's claim that the nineteenth century produces a discourse of sexuality as the object of scientific medical and psychological knowledge. Modernity finds a place for flagellation in the category of sadomasochism, subordinating it as perversion to an idea of "'natural' sexuality oriented toward functional normality and institutional legitimacy" (442). Thus, Largier argues, modernity, for all its claims to a sexual revolution, has not significantly shifted its paradigms of acceptability, for although it positively valorizes multiple forms of arousal, it does so with the aim of "genital unification and the naturalized image of finality that it...