Click cover to enlarge

 Open access under:
CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Echo

Edited by Hannah McIntyre and Hayley O'Kell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 15

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  This essay argues that the sexuality of Venus im Pelz’s masochist protagonist, Severin, is characterised by what I term the ‘echo compulsion’ of a traumatic, childhood scene. This term is a development of Freud’s notion of the subject’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ traumatic scenes but which emphasises the impossibility of any perfect repetition of such scenes — an echo literally being, in Joan Scott’s words, ‘an imperfect return of sound’. My argument draws on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche and in particular his account of Copernican (exogenous and traumatic in origin) and Ptolemaic (biological and endogenous in origin) subject formation. This dichotomy of Copernican and Ptolemaic subjectivity plays out at each erotic re-enactment throughout Venus im Pelz. While Severin labours under a Ptolemaic illusion that his masochism is innate, the Copernican truth undermines the illusion as each erotic re-staging exposes his compulsion to echo the formative trauma. The echo compulsion reveals the fallacy of Severin’s claims of sexual autonomy by highlighting the re-enactment’s distortion, but the notion of the echo also highlights a further removal of Severin’s sexual autonomy. An echo is not only a distorted return but it is an externalised manifestation of its own source. Severin may believe he regains control of his sexuality in choreographing restaged scenes of his childhood trauma, but like an echo, the scenes become externalised from him as they are performed and thus removed from his control.

Full text.  This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here:

Link to full text as PDF