Hans-Jürgen Döpp - Objects of Desire - The Eroticism of Touch

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ISBN: 978-1-64461-898-1

Hans-Jrgen Dpp

OBJECTS OF

DESIRE

The eroticism of touch

For Nadja Flgel

Contents

List of Illustrations

And yet surely the interiors of Catholic churches, with all those languishing virgins and galleries of naked, martyred bodies, are a school of sensuality in themselves? Do we have to conclude that museums and churches are dangerous places because they awaken a desire to touch?

Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathologia sexualis, gives us examples of acts of aggression commited against statues. He mentions, for example, the story of a young man who used a Praxiteles Venus to satisfy his desires; or the ancient story of Clisyphus, who abused a marble goddess in a temple of Samos after having placed a piece of meat on a certain part of her anatomy.

He also tells of a gardener who, in 1877, fell madly in love with the Venus de Milo and was caught rubbing himself fruitlessly against his beloved. However, Krafft-Ebbing does not question the pathological or abnormal nature of these cases.

(At this point the author can freely recall his own personal experiences during youthful nocturnal escapades in a park where there was a group of sculptures by Georg Kolbe which initiated him into the pleasures of touch. It was here that he understood for the first time how art can be erotic.)

Our sense of touch is a sexual sense in the most profound sense of the word. That is why Mantegazza describes physical love as the most developed form of the sense of touch. Ivan Bloch, following a similar argument, even speaks of the skin as one single sensual organ.

In order to achieve the natural conclusion of desire, one cannot do without touch: looking and touching are generally the two acts which precede the sexual act itself.

It is not by chance that Freud mentions that the sensations of touching the skin of a sexual object first of all create a new source of pleasure and a swelling of excitement. Even if looking remains the normal route to sexual excitement, excitement also comes from touching. Seeing the sexual organs naked gives us the desire to touch them. And as is often the case, looking replaces touching.

Kissing forms part of these exciting sensations. Freud writes rather seriously on this subject: One specific form of contact, that of the mucous membranes of the mouth, has gained amongst many peoples (including the most civilized) its own significance as a kiss, even if the body part involved is not a sexual organ but the entry to the digestive canal.

Indeed, after birth, isnt the mouth the first erogenous zone? Touching and looking are temporary but very exciting sexual pleasures. A useful technical comparison in a book about 20th-century customs can help us to understand better the difference between these two modes of sexual appropriation: If the eye is in some sort the telegraphic station of love, then touch is nothing less than the electric contact that makes the morse hammer move. Literature is full of examples of caresses between lovers which are far removed from the sexual act itself, but which can provoke states of violent excitation.

Ah, how the blood rushes through my veins, exclaims Goethes young Werther, when my finger accidentally touches hers, or when our feet meet under the table! I draw back as if from fire, and a secret force pushes me on again and I feel something like vertigo all through my body. Oh! Only her innocence and her unprejudiced soul prevent her from realizing how these little familiarities drive me to distraction. And if during a conversation she puts her hand on mind and comes closer to me in order to speak more clearly with me, and thus I feel the divine breath from her mouth on my lips, I dream of falling, as if I had been struck down!