The Denial of Death (33 page)

When we sum up this whole problem we can see that there are several ways to overcome the sense of sex as a species-standardization threat to oneself, most of which lie on a spectrum of desperation and ingenuity, rather than self-confidence and control. The most ideal way, the “highest” way, is of course in the experience of love. Here, one identifies with the partner totally and banishes the threat of separateness, helplessness, anxious self-consciousness
visà-vis
the body. The lover gives himself in joy and self-forgetful fulfillment, the body becomes the treasured vehicle for one’
s apotheosis, and one experiences real gratitude precisely
to
the species sameness. One is glad to have a standardized body because it permits the love union. But even without ideal love, one can give in to strong physical desire and allow himself to be “carried away” in a self-forgetful manner, so that the species is no threat to one’
s distinctive inner self. We see this in phallic narcissism and in some forms of what is called “nymphomania.” Here the person seems to give in to the species identity with a vengeance, to submerge himself in it totally. Perhaps this activity gives the person a relief from the burdens of his self and his dualism. It may often be what the psychoanalysts call a “counter-phobic” attitude: to embrace wholeheartedly just what one dreads, as a means of protesting that it holds no anxiety. In many forms of sado-masochism it must also represent the plunging into the “truth” of the body, the affirmation
of the physical as the primary area of reality, as Fromm has so well speculated. Finally, in schizoid persons, the anxiety connected with the species body is so great that they can simply dissociate themselves from their bodies, even during the act of sexual intercourse. In this way they preserve the sanctity of their own inner selves against the degradations of the body. Prostitutes, too, are said to actively practice this kind of self-body dissociation to keep their personal identities intact and pure no matter how degraded they may feel physically. As one schizophrenic girl rema
rked, in the most offhand manner, “I
think
I was raped on the way here. This is an affirmation, with a vengeance, of the transcendence of the inner spirit, a complete freedom from contamination by the body. Once again we see that schizophrenia represents the extreme frontier of the human condition, a desperate solution of the problem of dualism that evolution has saddled us with. This kind of desperation partakes necessarily of caricature: man cannot get rid of his body even if he throws it away—to paraphrase Goethe. There can be no absolute transcendence of the species role while men live. When eve
n the greatest talents of a Michelangelo leave us filled with some doubts about human victory, what are we to say of the pathetic efforts of lesser beings who must still drag their bodies through the span of life and use them to relate to others?

The Fetish Object and the Dramatization

Once we understand the problems of hermaphroditic wholeness, self and body, strength and weakness, species determinism and personal freedom, we can begin to get some id
ea of what the fetishists are trying to do. This is surely the most fascinating area of this problem, as we can see by exploring it even a little.

One of the main puzzles has been what the fetish object represented, what the meaning was of a shoe or a corset, leather and furs, or even an artificial leg.
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Freud and his followers maintained steadfastly that it represented “a quite special penis”—the mother’s.
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It was also argued that the fetish represented a denial of the penis, a vagina, feces, and the like. All of which seems to indicate that what it represented was not clear, that it could represent many things to many different fetishists, which is surely the truth of the matter. But another thing is sure, which is
that the fetish had to do with a problem posed by the sexual act. Boss showed this in a most brilliant manner.
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Out of his study, as well as from the excellent succession of papers by Greenacre, has come a new and fuller understanding of the fetish object. If fetishism represents the anxiety of the sexual act, the danger of species functioning for a symbolic animal, what must the fetish be if not some sort of magical charm? The fetish object represents the magical means for transforming animality into something transcendent and thereby assuring a liberation of the personality from the standardized, bland, an
d earthbound flesh. Such a liberation gives one the courage to perform the sexual act, as he is not bound to it in an animal way but already transcends it symbolically. Freud was right when he said that the fetish saved the person from homosexuality, but not because it was a penis—except perhaps, as Boss says,
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for the weakest men. Rather, the fetish is a way of transforming reality. Boss says of one of his patients:

Whenever he saw or touched [ladies boots] “the world changed miraculously,” he said. What had just appeared as “grey and senseless within the dreary, lonely and unsuccessful everyday, then suddenly drifts away from me, and light and glamour radiate from the leather to me.” These leather objects seemed to have “a strange halo” shedding its light upon all other things. “It is ridiculous, but it feels like being a fairy prince. An incredible power, Mana, emanates from these gloves, furs and boots, and completely enchants me.” … Naked women or a woman’s hand without a glove or especially a woman’
s foot without a shoe … seemed to be like lifeless pieces of meat in a butcher shop. In fact, a woman’s naked foot was really repulsive to him… . However, when the woman wore a glove, a piece of fur, or a riding boot, she was at once
“raised above her arrogant, too humanly personal level.” She then grew above the “pettiness and vicious concreteness of the common female” with her “abhorrent genitals” and she was raised into the super individual sphere, “the sphere where superhuman and subhuman blend into universal godliness.”
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Not much more needs to be said after such an astonishingly probing revelation. The fetish takes “species meat” and weaves a magic spell around it. The impersonal, concrete, animal demand is arrogant, insulting: you are confronted by a body and obliged to relate to that body wholly on its terms, terms entirely given by its flesh and sex. Boss’s patient says: “Somehow I always think that sexual intercourse is a great disgrace for humans.”
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The fetish changes all this by transforming the whole quality of the relationship. Everything is spiritualized, etherealized. The body is no longe
r flesh, no longer an impersonal demand by the species; it has a halo, emanates light and freedom, becomes a really personal, individual thing.
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As Greenacre so well argued, pills and pellets are forms of fetishes too, ways of overcoming anxiety, the terror of the body, in a reassuring magical way.
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Fetishism exists on a gamut running from pills all the way to furs, leather, silks, and shoes. We then have full-blown articles for the exercise of a kind of symbolic magic: the person hypnotizes himself with the fetish and creates his own aura of fascination that completely transforms the threatening reality.
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In other words, men use the fabrications of culture, in whatever form, as charms with which to transcend natural reality. Thi
s is really the extension of the whole problem of childhood: the abandonment of the body as
causa-sui
project, in favor of the new magic of cultural transcendence. No wonder fetishism is universal, as Freud himself remarked: all cultural contrivances are self-hypnotic devices—from motorcars to moon rockets—ways that a sorely limited animal can drum up to fascinate himself with the powers of transcendence over natural reality. As no one can be exactly comfortable in the species submergence of his distinctive inner self, all of us use a bit of magical charming in our relations to the world.

If the fetish object is a magical charm, then it naturally partakes of the qualities of magic, that is, it must have some of t
he properties of the thing that it seeks to control. To control the body, then, it must show some intimate relationship to the body—have an impress of its form, possess some of its smell, testify to its concreteness and animality. This is why, I think, the shoe is the most common fetish. It is the closest thing to
the
body and yet is not the body, and it is associated with what almost always strikes fetishists as the most ugly thing: the despised foot with its calloused toes and yellowed toenails. The foot is the absolute and unmitigated testimonial to our degraded animality, to the incongruity between our
proud, rich, lively, infinitely transcendent, free inner spirit and our earth-bound body. Someone I know summed it up perfectly: “The foot is such a dumb-looking thing.” Freud thought that the shoe was fetishized because, as it was the last thing the child saw before looking up at the dreaded genitals, he could safely stop there for his denial.
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But the foot is its own horror; what is more, it is accompanied by its own striking and transcending denial and contrast—the shoe. The genitals and breasts, it is true, are contrasted by underclothing and stiff corsets, which are popular as fetish
es, but nothing equals the foot for ugliness or the shoe for contrast and cultural contrivance. The shoe has straps, buckles, the softest leather, the most elegant curved arch, the hardest, smoothest, shiniest heel.
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There is nothing like the spiked high heel in all of nature, I venture. In a word, here is the quintessence of cultural contrivance and contrast, so different from the body that it takes one a safe world away from it even while remaining intimately associated to it.

Also, if the fetish is a charm it has to be a very personal and secret charm, as Greenacre argues. We have long known, from sociology and the writings of Simmel, how important the secret is for man. The secret ritual, the secret club, the secret formula—these create a new reality for man, a way of transcending and transforming the everyday world of nature, giving it dimensions it would not otherwise possess and controlling it in arcane ways. The secret implies, above all, power to control the given by the hidden and thus power to transcend the given—nature, fate, animal destiny. Or, as Green
acre put it, “… the secret relates at its most primitive level to body organs and processes … it contains more fundamentally the struggle with the fear of death… .”
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The secret, in other words, is man’s illusion par excelle
nce, the denial of the bodily reality of his destiny. No wonder man has always been in search of fountains of youth, holy grails, buried treasures—some kind of omnipotent power that would instantly reverse his fate and change the natural order of things. Greenacre recalls, too, with brilliant appositeness, that Hermann Goering hid capsules of poison in his anus, using them to take his own life in a final gesture of defiant power.
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This is the reversal of things with a vengeance: using the locus of animal fallibility as the source of transcendence, the container for the secret amulet that will ch
eat destiny. And yet this, after all, is the quintessential meaning of anality: it is the protest of all of man’s cultural contrivances as anal magic to prove that of all animals he alone leads a charmed life because of the splendor of what he can imagine and fashion, what he can symbolically spin out of his anus.

The final characteristic of mysterious rituals is that they be dramatized; and the activities of fetishists and allied perverts such as transvestites have always fascinated observers precisely because of that. They stage a complicated drama in which their gratification depends on a minutely correct staging of the scene; any small detail or failure to conform to the precise formula spoils the whole thing. The right words have to be pronounced at the right time, the shoes arranged in a certain way, the corset put on and laced correctly, and so on.
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The fetishist prepares for intercourse in
just the right way
to make it safe. The castration anxiety can be overcome only if the
proper forms
of things prevail. This pattern sums up the whole idea of ritual—and again, of all of culture: the manmade forms of things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it, and making it safe.

It is in transvestism that we see an especially rich staging of the drama of transcendence. Nowhere do we see the dualism of culture and nature so strikingly. Transvestites believe that they can transform animal reality by dressing it in cultural clothing—exactly as men everywhere do who dress pompously to deny, as Montaigne put it, that they sit “on their arse” just like any animal, no matter how grandiose the throne. The clinical transvestite, however, is even more dedicated than the average man, more simple-minded it seems, completely obsessed by the power of clothing to create an ident
ity. Often there is a past history of dressing dolls or of playing games with one’s sister in which clothing was exchanged a
nd with it the identity of each one.
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It is obvious that for these people “the play is the thing,” and they are as dedicated as stage personalities to actually being what their clothes make them.

What do they want to be? It seems that they want to refute the castration complex, overcome the species identity, the separation into sexes, the accidentally of the single sex and its confining fate, the incompleteness within each of us, the fact that we are a fragment not only of nature but even of a complete body. The transvestite seems to want to prove the reality of hermaphroditism by possessing a penis and yet appearing as a woman.
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“I want to be my sister and yet to retain my penis,” said one patient:

When indulging in his perverse practices, it was his custom, as soon as ejaculation had taken place, to tear the borrowed clothes off as quickly as possible. In connection with this he had the association that he had been warned that, if one made faces and the clock struck, one’s face would stay so. Thus he was afraid that he might actually “remain stuck” in his feminine role, and this would involve his forfeiting his penis.
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