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Criticism 43.2 (2001) 213-217



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Book Review

Sexuality and Form:
Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon


Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon by Graham L. Hammill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. x+219. $30.00 cloth.

"Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age": Luce Irigaray's assertion, quoted near the end of Graham Hammill's Sexuality and Form (169), is surely right. The reason has only partly to do with identity politics over the past thirty years. Or rather, identity politics over the past thirty years speak to the same philosophical issues that occupy Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) and Hammill in Sexuality and Form. Sexualität, sexualité, sexuality, sessualità, sexualidad: such words entered European languages in the 1830s and '40s because modern science demanded an abstract term to denote reproductive activity involving differences in male and female body parts and their functions. In the course of the nineteenth century that essentially biological concept became a psychological concept as sexuality increasingly came to mean the subjective experience of genital desire. The publication of Freud's works in the 1920s made that shift in meaning decisive. Sexuality is, for us, a fundamental factor in self-identity. Thanks to Foucault and his History of Sexuality (first volume 1976), it is also a social, political, even ontological concept. The word sexuality marks the site where the human body, ideology, and subjectivity converge. For postmodern thinkers sexuality functions as a master trope, in much the way anima did for scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth century.

The convergence of body, ideology, and subjectivity is precisely Hammill's focus in Sexuality and Form. The two terms in the book's title figure rather like the two prongs of a horseshoe-shaped magnet, each attracting its own conglomeration of metal filings and holding them in a state of suspension, while connecting them over the top. On the "sexuality" side are flesh, Jacques Lacan's objet a, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "intercorporeality"; on the "form" side are Norbert Elias's "civilizing process," Lacan's Law of the Father, and ideology as a force of subjection. Hammill's starting point for the entire project is Elias's "civilizing process," with its ambition to discipline the body and produce "an isomorphic relation between an increasingly sedimented body and an increasing abstracted judgment, the result of which is a regularized expression of social form as psychic space" (4). Hammill is interested in the violence of that process (a concern he shares with plenty of other critics)--and in the body's resistance to that process (a concern he makes very much his own). Where other critics see binaries, Hammill is apt to see threes--even if, strangely, he consistently uses "between" to relate those threes to one another. In connection with the poses in Caravaggio's paintings, for example, Hammill defines his project as "rethinking relations between being, violence, and the body" (21-22), while "sexuality" in the definition that governs the entire book [End Page 213] refers, not to object choice, but to "an insistent and repeated relation between corporeality, oneself, others, and the complexities of representation implied by the cluster of terms 'body,' 'oneself,' and 'others"' (128). In effect, "sexuality" in Hammill's formulation mediates among three entities: body, ego, and ideology.

As with "sexuality," Hammill's definition of "form" is primarily a relational concept. He resists the temptation to define "form" in terms of abstraction, as the antithesis of "substance" or as one part of the binary opposing the container to the contained. Citing both Louis Hjelmslev (Prologomena to a Theory of Language, 1961) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987), Hammill proposes that form and substance each possess both expression and content: "Substance is not an unmoved essence, no matter how much the ideological urges of an alignment of forms might attempt to make it that. Substance is 'chosen' matter. It is not simply an effect of sedimentation, an effect of the alignment of forms, but comprises the...

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