Bas-Relief: Footnotes on Statue-Love and Other Queer Couplings in Freud’s Reading of Gradiva

Might there be another type of couple?

—Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (16)

If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates.

—Jacques Derrida (Positions 40–1)

“On a visit to one of the great antique collections of Rome, Norbert Hanold had discovered a bas-relief which was exceptionally attractive to him, so he was much pleased, after his return to Germany, to be able to get a splendid plaster-cast of it” (3). With this line, Wilhelm Jensen begins Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy, his 1903 story of a young archeologist who falls in love with the lower end of a bas-relief (Fig. 1 below), or rather “a splendid plaster-cast of it,” which he names “Gradiva” (“the girl splendid in walking”). As if falling in love with a copy of a copy, most readers today—like Hanold—have learned to love Gradiva through the mediation of Freud’s interpretation. Critics agree that Freud’s “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva” (1906) represents one of his earliest and most extensive attempts to couple his new science of psychoanalysis with a work of literary art.¹ What is less readily acknowledged, however—even by a critic like Leo Bersani, who has (by himself and in various couplings) spilled so much precious ink on the Freudian corpus (including a book on Assyrian bas-reliefs which, remarkably, makes no mention of Gradiva— is how “Delusion and Dream” involves a queer romance, a story of statue-love in which the very life (Zoë) of the romantic couple is placed at stake.
 
To place a life at stake usually implies a sacrificial economy. In the case of the romantic couples here (psychoanalysis and art; Hanold and Gradiva), the burning question is sublimation. As Jean Laplanche notes of sublimation, “the term itself impl[ies] a transformation of solids into gas through fire” (26), a burning (up) associated with sacrifice. But what would the burning (up) of the romantic couple imply, if not a sort of consum(mat)ing without reserve—a sizzling consumption beyond reproductive copulation? And yet Hanold imagines his beloved Gradiva leaving behind the last trace of her life, her footprints, in the burning ash (cinders) of a Pompeii about to be simultaneously negated and preserved (aufheben, to use Hegel’s verb) in molten lava.² Thus, far from a simple “transformation of solids into gas through fire,” this slow congealing of Pompeii under blackening blobs of lava would seem to provide the lowest, basest possible counter-image to the airy, ethereal (f)light usually associated with the inspirational economies of romantic art and love.³ Such (f)light figures as the uplifting relève (to use Derrida’s translation) of both Hegelian “sublation” (Aufhebung) and Freudian “sublimation” (Sublimierung). And indeed, Derrida’s use of relève, as Alan Bass reminds us, comes from the verb relever, which means not only “to lift up” (as does aufheben) but “to relay” and “to relieve,” as when one soldier relieves another of duty, or when one relieves oneself by voiding the bladder or bowels.⁴ By translating Hegel’s Aufhebung as relève, then, Derrida not only inscribes an excessive “effect of substitution and difference” (Bass 20) within Hegel’s restricted economy of uplift,⁵ but he also remarks on a fatal coupling at the heart of its romantic copulation. In “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” (1968), Derrida tethers this uplifting inspirational (f)light—the life of the Trinitarian Spirit (Geist)—to the dark remains of a corpse entombed at the base of a stony, triangular pyramid inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphic reliefs.⁶ Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that our young archeologist, Hanold, also calls his beloved bas-relief a “tombstone” (Jensen 14), despite his inflamed imagination. Indeed, given the gravity of such weighty counter-images, it is no wonder that Freud never mentions the uplifting word “sublimation” in his Gradiva study. (Nor, for that matter, does he ever read Hanold’s love in terms of fetishism—more on this later.)
 
And yet, the subject of sublimation increasingly preoccupies Freud in the years immediately following this early attempt to couple his new science of psychoanalysis with Jensen’s “little romance” (Freud, Delusion 125). Perhaps it is worth investigating what Freud may have encountered in this early romantic coupling that could have compelled him in the years immediately following to elaborate a more explicitly self-conscious concept of sublimation. Such an investigation would be crucial because, as Bersani suggests, “[s]ublimation is not a liminal or unnecessary psychoanalytic concept; rather it is the concept that, by legitimizing psychoanalysis’ claim to being a philosophy of culture, can either reinforce or threaten its strained complicity in the culture of redemption” (“Erotic Assumptions” 35).⁷ But if “the great achievement of psychoanalysis” is, as Bersani also claims, “its attempt to account for our inability to love others” (Intimacies 60), then perhaps it is equally crucial to know whether “others” includes things such as bas-reliefs. And if not, why not? Is it even possible to understand such things, as Freud claims to be doing here, in terms otherwise than those of fetishism and its humanist metaphysics?⁸ And, finally, what are the implications of such matters for Freud’s latter-day queer disciples?⁹ What I want to suggest is not only that Freud indeed encounters something base in the young scientist Hanold’s love for a bas-relief, but also that in seeking relief from such matters Freud (himself a young scientist at the time) is forced to consider the question of how there could ever arise a space of aesthetic sublimation unlike Hanold’s Pompeii, the birthplace of pornography.¹⁰ In such a space of cultural life, persons could couple with things without falling into the grave delusion of statue-love. Such a speculative Hegelian¹¹ hypothesis regarding the genealogy of Freud’s conception of sublimation would be all too appropriate here, if it did not immediately stumble over a couple of splendid impediments. Not only does Freud never manage to erect such a fully-realized concept of sublimation, but his failure already repeats the defeat of Hanold’s attempt to realize his romantic copulation with Zoë (a living person) without the mediation of Gradiva (a lifeless thing). Freud’s defeat, in other words, repeats the double feet/feat of the bas-relief Gradiva, whose two arrested (and arresting) feet rise and fall without end, rest, or relief (relève), thus enacting and annihilating the uplifting life (Zoë) of the romantic couple, i.e., reproductive copulation.
 

I

[W]e usually think of . . . the humanizing attributes of intimacy within a couple, where the personhood of each partner is presumed to be expanded and enriched by the knowledge of the other.

—Leo Bersani (Intimacies 53)

[P]erhaps there is something in human “life” that is incompatible with life.

—Barbara Johnson (122)

As I insinuated above, it’s puzzling that the apparent sacrifice at stake in Gradiva vis-à-vis the life of the romantic couple has never been taken up by Leo Bersani, who, perhaps more than any other critic in recent years, has tried to expose the insidious—and often, but not always, heterosexual—figure of the couple at the heart of various cultural-theoretical discourses of intimacy and love.¹² As the normative model of romance institutionalized in marriage, monogamy, and the family, the figure of the romantic couple often flies under the radar of theory. As Bersani writes in “Against Monogamy” (1998), even “the most radical theorists [Freud and Lacan] have for the most part remained remarkably silent—or at best vague and inconclusive—about the relevance of their theoretical subversions to a possible questioning of the couple…as a normative model for psychoanalytic therapy” (92). At first glance, it may appear that Freud’s reading of Gradiva can do nothing for Bersani’s radical questioning of the couple, given that Freud himself seems to valorize Hanold’s apparently successful reunion with Zoë as a form of therapeutic cure. Such a reading, I want to argue, ignores Hanold’s “pedestrian investigations” (Jensen 11) into the queer, lifeless life of Zoë-Gradiva, investigations carried out at the feet of his beloved bas-relief.
 

 

 
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Fig. 1.

Gradiva bas-relief, 4^th-c. B.C. Roman copy. Photo by Rama. Wikimedia Creative Commons.
 

 

Indeed, it will be our wager here that such pedestrian investigations already defeat any question of an uplifting romantic reunion between Hanold and Zoë. By dramatizing the impossibility of ever untangling the living person (Zoë) from the lifeless thing (Gradiva), Gradiva shows the impossibility of answering once and for all what Hanold calls “the question of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva might possess” (75). Or as Jensen puts it: “even if it had occurred to [Hanold] that Gradiva was only a dead bas-relief, it was also equally beyond doubt that she was still alive . . . [and that] her name was Zoë” (Delusion 102).
 
More an uncanny coupling than a couple, this “dual nature” of Zoë-Gradiva (Delusion 102)—her/its lifeless life, simultaneously person-thing, life-death, cure-illness—gives Freud pause in his reading of Jensen’s Gradiva, freezing his forward progress like the stone-cold feet of Hanold’s bas-relief. In other words, it is as though Freud himself encounters a stumbling block on the roundabout road to Hanold’s romantic reunion with Zoë, one that forces him into a digression on the strangeness of Zoë’s supposed cure. As Freud states, it is strange that the real-life Zoë, Hanold’s long-lost childhood friend, should end up being both the original drive behind Hanold’s delusory flight to Pompeii and the secondary vehicle of his cure. Jensen’s novel, then, forces Freud to consider how Zoë could be both delusion and cure, such that the same thing that spurs Hanold’s flight into delusion ends up delivering him over to what he was fleeing from. Or, as Freud states: “If Zoë is the right person, we shall soon learn how one cures delusions like those of our hero [Hanold] . . . . It would be very striking . . . if the treatment and . . . the delusion should coincide [in the same person: Zoë] . . . . We have a suspicion, of course, that our case [Hanold’s statue-love] might then turn out to be an ‘ordinary’ love story” (Delusion 142).
 
An ordinary love story! What could Freud mean by this? What could possibly be ordinary—or should we say, pedestrian—about Hanold’s delusory case of statue-love? After all, as Freud himself tells us:

Hanold acts quite differently from ordinary people. He has no interest in the living woman; science, which he serves, has taken this interest from him and transferred it to women of stone or bronze. Let us not consider this an unimportant peculiarity; it is really the basis of [Jensen’s] story, for one day it happens that a single such bas-relief [Gradiva] claims for itself all the interest which would otherwise belong only to the living woman [Zoë], and thereby originates the delusion [Zoë-Gradiva].

(Delusion 174–5)

What transforms Jensen’s Gradiva into an ordinary love story (“little romance”) is not Hanold’s statue-love or his lack of interest for the living woman but rather Jensen’s (apparently) cheesy romantic invention of making Hanold’s cure and delusion coincide in the same person. Zoë (the analyst figure), after re-awakening Hanold’s desire for the living woman, can then offer herself as the consummation of his re-awakened love for life in the form of the romantic couple. A real analyst, Freud reminds us, could never marry his or her patient. Hence Gradiva’s romantic cheesiness. And granted, while this may be one way to read the seemingly uplifting reunion with Zoë at the end of Jensen’s “Pompeiian Fancy,” it is clearly one that doesn’t do much for Bersani’s radical questioning of the couple.

 
But is it really such a “fortunate set of circumstances,” as Freud says, that the cure (Zoë) and the delusion (Gradiva) coincide as if coupled in the same person (same thing)? Isn’t this, instead, precisely the queer paradox Hanold names Zoe-Gradiva, lifeless life? Indeed, as Sarah Kofman notes in her reading of Gradiva, such a strange coincidence of illness and cure operates more like a pharmakon (in the Derridean sense), radically undermining any naïve illusion of the romantically reunited happy couple through the pharmakon’s uncanny figuration of an “originary double” (“Delusion” 187). In other words, as Freud implies, there is a way in which Zoë’s cure for Hanold is itself just another delusion, just another replicated love life modeled on the (double) feat/feet of an ancient plaster-copy bas-relief. How else, then, are we to read the concluding scene of Jensen’s novel, when the apparently cured Hanold asks the real-life Zoë to replicate for him the distinctive lift of the foot on which his love for Gradiva had once hinged (Fig. 2)? Or, as Freud glosses this final scene of supposed romantic reunion, “The delusion [Gradiva] had now been conquered by a beautiful reality [Zoë]; but before the two lovers [the couple] left Pompeii it [the delusion] was still to be honoured once again. When they reached . . . some ancient stepping-stones, Hanold paused and asked the girl [Zoë] to go ahead of him. She understood him ‘and pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoë Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past . . . as though in a dream . . . with her quietly tripping gait’” (Delusions 39–40). And so, with this final “triumph of love” (Delusions 40), as Freud says, “what was beautiful and valuable in the delusion is now acknowledged” (Delusion 166). But is it really?
 

 

 
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Fig. 2.

Gradiva bas-relief (detail). Photo by Rama. Wikimedia Creative Commons.
 

 

As Ika Willis argues, to truly acknowledge such a “triumph of love” would entail something far queerer than Freud (apparently) is willing to admit, since:

At the end of [Jensen’s] novel . . . Zoë is in fact standing in for Gradiva, rather than the other way round, as Freud’s reading would have it. Hanold desires Zoë insofar as she is a substitute for a substitute. The novel . . . end[s] by fulfilling not Hanold’s desire for Zoë (which would return him to “real life”), but his antiquarian desire for Gradiva” Gradiva’s name, as noted, derives from her gait . . . . [Thus] the novel seems to end with the victory of the archeological [Gradiva] over “real life” [Zoë]. That is to say, where at first it seemed that the substitute, Gradiva, in fact delivered Hanold’s desire to its true object, Zoë, now it is possible to reverse those positions . . . [with] Zoë . . . reincorporated into [Gradiva’s deadly] circuit . . . . It could be argued, then, that Hanold’s acceptance of “real life,” of the unmediated presence of Zoë, is itself a sacrifice.

(Willis 227–8)

Unlike Freud, then, who reads Hanold’s triumphant reunion with Zoë as a return to real love and the couple through a momentary deviation of statue-love, Willis reads this very same love of Zoë as being itself a deviation from a more general condition of what we might call originary replication (or originary mediation). In other words, it is Hanold’s love for Zoë (real life), not his love for Gradiva (dead matter), that is truly deviant, precisely as a deviation from deviation. And it is because of this delusory deviation from originary deviation that Willis suggests that Hanold’s love for Zoë might itself be the real sacrifice.

 
But why sacrifice? And isn’t Willis here implicitly reintroducing the burning question of sublimation and its sacrificial economy at the very moment he thinks he is challenging Freud’s uplifting reading of Hanold’s final reunion with Zoë? It is for this reason, I think, that we need to look closer at Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, for it is there that the burning question of Jensen’s little romance—its uplifting reunion (relève)—is already repeatedly posed and problematized in the arrested and arresting figure of Gradiva’s lift of the foot, i.e., at the very basis of Hanold’s love for Gradiva. Indeed, we might say that it is the endless (dis)placement of Gradiva’s two feet which has been captivating Hanold from the start. Thus, in his description of his beloved’s gait, Hanold says it was as if “the left foot had advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only lightly with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel were raised almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of . . . flight-like poise, combined with a firm step” (Jensen 4–5). A double impression! But isn’t this double impression of Gradiva’s gait—its uplifted poise coupled with its firm step— precisely a repetition of the word “bas-relief,” as though, in its hyphenated coupling, the very word “bas-relief” literally enacts and annihilates the uplifting flight of both Hegelian sublation and Freudian sublimation? In other words, instead of merely enacting the “magical power that transforms water to wine, stones to flesh . . . death to life” (33), as Mark C. Taylor writes of Hegel’s sacrificial economy of love, it is as though the queer coupling of the hyphenated word “bas-relief”—a hyphenation repeated in the name “Zoë-Gradiva”— graphically refuses any release from its base, as though tethering each of its two words to the gravity of a base “third” (turd), without relief, without end. Simultaneously abject (grounded) and ethereal (flight-like), like Georges Bataille’s famous “Big Toe” (le gros Orteil), Hanold’s pedestrian investigations thus remind us that the basis of man’s proud erection remains covered in mud—congealed in shit.
 
Like Bataille, I am arguing that a certain configuration of the hyphenated “third” (turd) in Jensen’s novel endlessly (dis)places the elevated supremacy of the couple in an arresting and arrested double movement without relief or sublimation. Or, as Taylor writes: “If there are two, there are always already at least three. The insistence of the third calls into question the integrity of the One” (274). In his reading of Bataille’s “Big Toe” (le gros Orteil), Roland Barthes notes a similar double movement around the French word for toe, orteil, which derives from articulus, meaning “little member or limb” (“infantile phallus”). Barthes argues that Bataille’s title is scandalous in its perverse play of double meanings: “on the one hand, gros is repulsive in a way that grand is not; and on the other, the diminutive (articulus) can also be repulsive . . . . [T]he toe is seductive-repulsive; fascinating as a contradiction: that of the tumescent and miniaturized phallus” (245). For Barthes, then, Bataille’s heterology is not simply the result of linking the ignoble erection of man’s dirty big toe to man’s noble upright posture, but of deconstructing the very couple (“noble”/“ignoble”) through the addition of what Barthes calls a scandalous third term (“base”) which is not regular (“noble”/“base”/“ignoble”) (246). This third in-between term is “an independent term, concrete, eccentric, irreducible: the term of seduction outside the (structural) law” (Barthes 246). Now, it would be tempting to read the hyphenated terms of Jensen’s little romance according to Bataille’s notion of the eccentric third term. Because they are heterological to the uplifting flight of sublimation, such third terms “[baffle] the nature of matter in itself ” (Barthes 246) and thus echo the stakes of Hanold’s pedestrian investigations into the queer lifeless life of a bas-relief. And yet, if the goal of Bataille’s “base materialism” (“heterology”) is to make things “insecure, wobbly (the etymological meaning of ‘scandalous’)” (Barthes 246), then it is still not clear how a pedestrian case of statue-love—or what J. Hillis Miller pejoratively calls a mere “version of Pygmalion” (vii)—could ever upset the uplifted/uplifting pedestal of the romantic couple and its uncanny fruitfulness.¹³ After all, what could be more Hegelian than the notion of the third, i.e., turning shit (base matter) into gold (conceptual value) through a three-step process of uplifting sublation (Aufhebung)? What a relief! It’s as if one could relieve oneself without a dirty, stinking remainder.
 

II

Remain(s)—to (be) know(n)—what causes shitting.

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 37)

[T]he fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated.

—Georges Bataille (“Use Value” 101)

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the only other major digression in Freud’s reading of Jensen’s little romance revolves around a dirty etching by Félicien Rops (Fig. 3), which Freud introduces as another allegory of repression. Like the simultaneous destruction and preservation of Pompeii under black blobs of lava, Rops’s etching also illustrates for Freud how repression never coincides with the total destruction, or total obliteration, of a memory, because a dirty trace of it always remains “potent and effective” (Delusion 159–160). Or as Freud says, quoting an old Latin proverb: “You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will always return” (Delusion 160). It is this double movement of repression that Freud then links with “the lives of saints and penitents” depicted in Félicien Rops’s etching, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1878).
 

 

 
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Fig. 3.

Félicien Rops, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1878), Musée Félicien Rops, Namur. Engraved by Jean de la Palette. Used by permission.
 

 

Here, then, is how Freud describes the scandalous scene:

From the [base] temptations of the world, an ascetic monk [St. Anthony] has sought refuge [relief] in the [uplifting] image of the crucified Savior. Then, phantom-like, this [uplifted] cross sinks [down into the dirt] and, in its stead, there rises [elevated] shining, the image of a voluptuous, unclad woman, in the same [elevated] position of the crucifixion. Other [lesser] painters . . . have, in such representations of temptation, depicted sin . . . near the [uplifted] Savior on the cross. [But] Rops, alone, has allowed it [the base] to take the place of the Savior on the cross.

(Delusion 161)

What is happening in this remarkable description? Is Freud simply providing us with an allegory of repression, as he claims, or rather one of sublimation? And isn’t Freud’s rhetoric, in fact, repeating what Hanold had already discovered at the feet of his beloved bas-relief, the endless (dis)placement of the two? That depends. According to Freud’s allegory, the two-pronged fork, like the cross in Rops’s pornographic etching, unwittingly becomes the vehicle (both the carrier and the telos) of the very thing it tries to drive out: sex. It is as if Freud wants us to see only a pathological return of the repressed instead of an endless movement of (dis)placement. And yet, as Freud himself points out, the nude, voluptuous woman not only approaches the uplifted Savior on the cross, but takes his place, just as, in Freud’s reading of Jensen’s novel, archeology (base matter: Gradiva) takes the place of (relève) Zoë. In both cases, then, it is as if Freud wants us to see the instrument of repression (the cross in Rops’s etching; archeology in Jensen’s novel) as both the means and the end of a pathological return. And yet, despite all this, Freud nevertheless goes on to state (somewhat mischievously), “If . . . archeology [had] driven love . . . out of [Hanold’s] life, it would now be legitimate and correct that an antique relief should awaken in him the forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his childhood; it would be his well-deserved fate to have fallen in love with the stone representation of Gradiva” (Delusion 161).

 
Why his well-deserved fate? Freud’s implication, I think, goes something like this: Hanold’s capacity to love proceeds from a kind of reversed Pygmalionism. Instead of the living person (Pygmalion) giving life to a dead thing (statue), it is the dead thing (statue) which gives life to the living person.¹⁴ Hanold’s love for the lifeless Gradiva, in other words, precedes his awakening to so-called real life. It is thus the queer condition of (im)possibility for his interest in real women. But if Hanold’s love for the secondary lifeless replica is paradoxically original—the very source of his awakening to real love—then doesn’t this automatically necessitate a radical rethinking of some of the basic couples of Western thought (originary/secondary; person/thing; life/death; reality/illusion; health/sickness)? Indeed, as I shall argue, it is precisely at the beginning of Jensen’s little romance, with our entrance into this delusory world of Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, that we begin to catch a glimpse of what such a radical rethinking might entail. From the very start of Jensen’s novel, in other words, we are plunged into a world where, for Hanold, “marble and bronze were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed the purpose and value of human life; and so [Hanold] sat in the midst of his walls, books and pictures, with no need of any other intercourse” (Jensen 18–9). From the very start of Gradiva, then, we are sutured to a queer figure that has “no need of any other intercourse” besides that with “marble and bronze,” “books and pictures.”
 
Of course, within a heteronormative framework of “reproductive futurism,” as Lee Edelman argues, such queer intercourse with inanimate things can always be read as a (deadly) delusion. The irony of Jensen’s reversed Pygmalionism, however, is that it is only through the incitement of such lifeless things that Hanold can ever really come to life at all. In other words, it is the strange feat/feet of a lifeless bas-relief that compels Hanold to go outside and compare Gradiva’s distinctive gait with that of real women on the street. Such “pedestrian investigations” (11), as Jensen writes, “forced [Hanold] . . . to a mode of action utterly foreign to him; women had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze and he had never given his feminine contemporaries the least consideration” (9). Far from being a mere deadly delusion, then, Hanold’s love for Gradiva provokes him into the real world, with his love for the lifeless, inhuman statue paradoxically awakening him to real “life” (Zoë). But if this is the case, what happens to the allegory of repression in Freud’s reading of Rops’s pornographic etching? Is such an allegory compatible with Jensen’s queer logic of reversed Pygmalionism? As Freud himself implies, it is Hanold’s coupling with Gradiva that is the condition of (im)possibility for his subsequent capacity to love the living woman. And so, rather than a pathological case of a repressed matter returning to replace the uplifted Savior, it is as if Hanold’s (in)capacity to love the living woman has always-already been marked by the double feat/feet of a bas-relief. And if this is the case, Rops’s pornographic etching becomes less an allegory of repression than of its endlessly (de)feeted sublimation. My point here, then, is not that we should simply replace Rops’s The Temptation of St. Anthony with, say, Thomas Rowlandson’s Modern Pygmalion (Fig. 4).
 

 

 
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Fig. 4.

Thomas Rowlandson, Modern Pygmalion (ca. 1812). Image by Silenus. Wikimedia Creative Commons.
 

 

On the contrary, Rowlandson’s pornographic version of Pygmalion also ends up transubstantiating the queer coupling of a bas-relief into a romantic couple. Now, the artificial erection of a lifeless statue (Galatea) is replaced by the uplifted erection of the living artist/creator (Pygmalion) and his pro-creative copulation. Perhaps Freud’s similar misreading of an endlessly (de)feeted coupling for a happily reunited couple also explains why so many of his latter-day queer disciples have virtually ignored Gradiva. And yet, to do so, as I’ve been arguing here, is to ignore one of literature’s most radical critiques of the romantic (human, heterosexual) couple. And so, it is to this radical critique of marriage and the romantic couple in Gradiva that I shall now turn.
 

III

[O]ur heterosexual culture . . . reserv[es] the highest relational value for the couple.

—Leo Bersani (Intimacies 42)

Marriage: relief of the implement. The implement is solid. . . . Marriage is the relief of the constraint, the interiorization of this exteriority, the consum(m)ating of the implement . . . . [As the] free inclination of both sexes, marriage excludes any contract. Such an abstract juridical bond could in effect bind persons only to (dead) things.
 

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 123–4)

If “our heterosexual culture . . . reserv[es] the highest relational value for the couple,” as Bersani argues, then it would be hard to find a more explicit critique of this romantic system than Hanold’s anti-humanist devaluation of couples throughout the first half of Jensen’s Gradiva. On his initial trip to Rome, for example, Hanold complains of being unable to escape the “swarms” of honeymooning “dualists” (22), i.e., “young bridal couples [who are] as rapturous as [they are] vapid” (23). Indeed, the young archeologist finds himself absolutely bewildered by the motivations of these honeymooning couples and their follies:

[F]or the first time he saw . . . people brought together by the mating impulse without his being able to understand what had been the mutual cause. It remained incomprehensible to him why the women had chosen these men, and still more perplexing why the choice of the men had fallen upon these women . . . . To be sure, he lacked a standard for measuring, for, of course, one could not compare the women of today, with the sublime beauty of the old works of art . . . there was something lacking which ordinary life was in duty bound to offer. So he reflected for many hours on the strange impulses of human beings, and came to the conclusion that of all their follies, marriage, at any rate, took the prize as the greatest and most incomprehensible one.

(22–3)

Caught amidst this incomprehensible swarm of honeymooning couples, Hanold begins to notice a “strangely oppressive feeling had again taken possession of him, a feeling that he was imprisoned in a cage which this time was called Rome” (27). To escape this romantic cage— “to escape the ‘inseparables’” (27)—he decides to flee to Pompeii because, as one young bridal couple tells him despairingly, “there are only old stones and rubbish there” (29). In Pompeii, however, Hanold immediately finds himself besieged by yet another domestic “two-winged creature,” the “musca domestica communis, the common house-fly” (32):

He had never been subject to violent emotions; yet a hatred of these two-winged creatures burned within him; he considered them the basest evil invention of Nature . . . and recognized in them invincible proof against the existence of a rational world-system . . . . [They] whizzed before his eyes, buzzed in his ears, tangled themselves in his hair, tickled his nose, forehead and hands. Therein they reminded him of honeymoon couples . . . . [I]n the mind of the tormented man [Hanold] rose a longing for a . . . splendidly made fly-flapper like one unearthed from a burial vault, which he had seen in the Etruscan museum in Bologna . . . . [F]lies and bridal couples swarming en masse were not calculated to make life agreeable anywhere.

(33–5; emphasis added)

Isn’t Hanold’s longing for a “splendidly made fly-flapper” amidst this swarm of “flies and bridal couples” just like his longing for Gradiva (“the girl splendid in walking”)? Indeed, the splendid coupling of these two longings is confirmed later in Jensen’s novel, when, under the burning noonday sun of Pompeii, the flies and bridal couples suddenly vanish: “with their vanishing, what had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely changed appearance, but not a living one” (Jensen 40). In this uncanny, midday milieu, Hanold’s wish for a “splendidly made fly-flapper” is apparently answered by the sudden apparition of his beloved Gradiva: “something suddenly stepped forth . . . and across the lava stepping-stones . . . Gradiva stepped buoyantly” (46). Or as Jensen says: “[Hanold] found what he was looking for” (53). Having been harassed across Rome by swarms of two-winged creatures, it is as though Hanold now finally finds relief in the queerly coupled apparition of a splendidly made Zoë-Gradiva-fly-flapper: splat!
 
And yet, the question remains: Why do so many critical readings of Gradiva (including Freud’s) ignore Hanold’s explicit critique of the romantic (human, heterosexual) couple as an insidious domestic pest? In her recent Persons and Things (2008), for instance, Barbara Johnson notes that in his reading of Gradiva, “Freud seems to have set up a simple logic: love of statue = sick = repressed, love of real woman = healthy = free from repression. The only strange element in this structure is the animal Jensen uses to represent life: the housefly. Life is that which annoys” (148). But, as we have just seen, Jensen explicitly couples flies and bridal couples. For Hanold, these two-winged creatures go together. It is not simply life which annoys, but the (re)productive life of the romantic couple which annoys, which swarms, and which deserves a good swat with a splendidly made fly-paper. To miss this queer coupling in Jensen’s little romance is to miss how Hanold’s delusional love for a splendidly made bas-relief offers contemporary queer theory untapped material for thinking about what Bersani and Dutoit call “non-copulative mode[s] of pairing” (22). Of course, since the most contemptible thing for Bersani and Dutoit is for the partners of such non-copulative pairings to become cemented, fixed, and immobilized, like “blocks of self-contained matter” (23), it is doubtful they would be willing to read Hanold’s love for an immobile, inanimate, plaster bas-relief as anything but a grave loss of “levity” (23). Indeed, for Bersani, Baudelaire’s obsession with statue sex—“so white, so cold” (Baudelaire 69)—is itself a reactionary defense against such a life of levity and mobility. Or as Bersani writes, “necrophilia is the Baudelairean erotic ideal; it is sex with an absolutely still partner . . . [and] aspires to a sexuality compatible with death” (Baudelaire 70). And yet, if “the homo” is the one who risks “loving the other as the same, in homo-ness,” as Bersani famously asserts elsewhere, and thus the one who “risks his own boundaries, risks knowing where he ends and the other begins” (Homos 128–9), isn’t it possible to read Hanold as a sort of Bersanian homosexual, i.e., as one who risks loving “the other” (the non-human) as “the same” (the human)? Again, I suspect Bersani would say (as he does in Homos) that such “a perfectly realized and definitive homo-ness is incompatible with life” (171). Homo-ness, it seems, must transport one into the world, into life, but never into death.
 
And yet, Freud, some eighteen years after his early attempt at coupling his new science of psychoanalysis with Jensen’s little romance, himself returns to the question of Zoë (“life”) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). There, he famously speculates that the love of life may be but a secondary deviation—or, as he puts it, a “complicated détour” (46)— from a more primordial drive for the inanimate (46). Like Hanold’s love for the ancient bas-relief, then, Freud speculates that all “organic life,” while appearing to be ruled by the mobility and levity of change, is actually motivated by a more conservative drive for “an earlier state of things” (Beyond 44), what we might call (á la Hanold) an archeological striving for an “ancient goal” (Beyond 45). Thus, as Freud states:

[The] final goal of all organic striving [is] . . . . an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.”

(Beyond 45–6)

But by claiming that this drive for inanimate things precedes and makes possible a secondary deviation toward living ones, isn’t Freud, here, offering a version of the reversed Pygmalionism we identified at the very heart of Jensen’s novel? And if so, can’t we say that the later Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle unwittingly comes around to Hanold’s pedestrian investigations, even to the point of repeating a version of them as his own? Note, for example, Freud’s speculations on the strange evocation of life out of inanimate matter:

The attributes of life were . . . evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception . . . . The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out . . . to return to the inanimate state . . . . till decisive external influences altered it in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death.

(Beyond 46)

If the love of life is a secondary deviation (delusion?) provoked from out of a more originary inanimate state of things, i.e., a deviation from deviation, then doesn’t the opposition of life and death become less a couple than an originary double?

Indeed, in her essay “The Double is/and the Devil: The Uncanniness of The Sandman,” Sarah Kofman is interested in tracing Freud’s resistance to precisely such figures of originary doubleness throughout his 1919 essay on “The Uncanny,” an essay written roughly at the same time as Beyond the Pleasure Principle. And although Kofman never connects the figure of the double in “The Uncanny” to the figure of the couple in Freud’s Gradiva essay, she does note how Freud’s “Uncanny” also revolves around the story of a young man who falls in love with an inanimate thing, a doll. Like Hanold’s love for a statue, Nathaniel’s love for the doll Olympia in The Sandman becomes the locus for Kofman’s critique of Freud’s essay. Why, Kofman wonders, doesn’t Freud consider Nathaniel’s love for Olympia a paradigmatic case of the uncanny (“The Double” 141)? In a section titled “The Animate and the Inanimate: Diabolical Mimesis,” Kofman suggests that Freud’s dismissal of Nathaniel’s doll-love simply repeats a more general fear of the supplement (writing) operating throughout Western thought. Following Derrida, Kofman states, “Writing’s supplementarity indefinitely calls forth supplementarity because there has never been an originary model perfectly present and complete . . . . It [the double, the supplement] indicates that life must necessarily always pass through death” (“The Double” 137). But instead of confronting this logic of the supplement, Freud turns Nathaniel’s doll-love—like Hanold’s statue-love—into a simple, binary case of delusion, a case of lifeless artifice simply flipping sides with living reality. According to this scenario, Nathaniel (like Hanold) simply forgets living presence and turns instead to dead representations, revealing his pathological preference for a dead fiancée over a flesh and blood one. And yet, as Kofman argues, what is truly uncanny (queer) about Nathaniel’s love (and hence what is resisted by Freud) is the “failure to distinguish between the living and the dead” (“The Double” 142; emphasis added). Where everyone else sees a binary opposition between life and death, Nathaniel (like Hanold) couples them in his love, revealing the “indissoluble bond between life and death” (Kofman, “The Double” 148). And it is this queer coupling of animate and inanimate in a general economy of the double which is, for Kofman, Freud’s ultimate insight into the unheimlich (although one he reveals only despite himself, unwittingly). Thus: “understood as a general economy, the distinction between the imaginary and the real is replaced by a problematics of a simulacrum without an originary model” (Kofman, “The Double” 160).
 
With Kofman’s evocation of a Derridean general economy of the double, it would appear that we have now moved beyond the sacrificial economy we started out with, i.e., the burning question of the romantic couple.¹⁵ And yet, even the older Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle ends his book with yet another triumph of the romantic couple. To be precise, Freud ends his book by adding another step to his speculations regarding the need of “organic life” to “restore an earlier state of things” (Beyond 69). Instead of being a primordial death drive for the inanimate, Freud wonders whether this hypothetical drive might simply be a repetition of an ancient myth recorded in Plato’s Symposium. According to this myth, original human nature was different from present human nature. “Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two . . . . After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one [couple]’” (Freud, Beyond 69–70). But by adding this final Platonic (and we might say Hegelian) step to his speculations, Freud’s drive for restoring an earlier state of things becomes not a drive for the inanimate but for the reconciliation of the divided couple: romantic copulation. It is here, perhaps, that we should recall Kofman’s larger point regarding Freud’s readings of novels, namely, that they are “fictions, ‘romances’ in their own right” (Freud and Fiction 3).
 

IV

[T]he play of copula is subtle. Like that of the couple in general. In fact, concerning such a pair, why do they say a couple?

—Jacques Derrida (Glas 248–9)

[A] person turning to stone is usually bad, while a stone coming to life is desirable. But perhaps it is the confusion of the two realms [“life” and “non-life”] that is really, and unavowedly, attractive. Walter Benjamin . . . speaks often of the “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

—Barbara Johnson (20–1)

As Barbara Johnson notes, Walter Benjamin often speaks of “the sex appeal of the inorganic” when describing fetishism (Benjamin 153). By way of conclusion, then, I want to consider why it is that Freud surprisingly dismisses fetishism in his reading of Gradiva, and what this dismissal implies not only for my speculative hypothesis regarding the rise and fall of sublimation as a concept in Freud’s thinking, but what this dismissal might also imply for contemporary queer theorists interested in perverse couplings of “persons” and “things.” After all, such a dismissal of fetishism seems remarkable given that Gradiva would seem to have provided Freud with a tailor-made case of foot fetishism. But as Freud states:

The psychiatrist [as opposed to the psychoanalyst] would perhaps assign Hanold’s delusion . . . [to] “fetichistic erotomania,” because falling in love with the bas-relief would be the most striking thing to him and because, to his conception, which coarsens everything, the interest of the young archeologist in the feet and foot-position of women must seem suspiciously like fetichism. All such names and divisions . . . are, however, substantially useless and awkward.

(Delusion 173–4)

Although Freud clearly dismisses the diagnosis of fetishism here, he nevertheless admits that the psychiatrist might still be tempted by it. By contrast, the most striking thing about Jensen’s novel for Freud is that, “Before our eyes there is then unfolded the story of how this delusion is cured by a fortunate set of circumstances, the interest transferred back again from the cast to the living girl” (175). In other words, rather than remaining, like Hanold, uselessly fixated on the end-less (de)feet of bas-relief—its (dis)placement of the two—Freud is attentive to the fortunate unfolding of its cure as a romantic reunion. For Freud, the speculative economy of Jensen’s novel is its great analytic insight: Hanold’s interest is not uselessly squandered or endlessly wasted, but “transferred back again”—fortunately—in his reunion with Zoë.

 
Of course, throughout this paper, we have seen all the ways this “fortunate” reunion with Zoë never seems to get off the ground. The hyphenated coupling of the very word “bas-relief” at once makes possible and resists absolutely—i.e., enacts and annihilates—any idealization, conceptualization, and the (re)productive copulation of Aufhebung. But does this mean that we, too, are like the psychiatrist quoted above whose coarse perspective sees fetishism everywhere? Indeed, isn’t fetishism, by supposedly taking the side of things, a way for contemporary queer theorists to critique the uplifting relève of both Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) and Freudian sublimation (Sublimierung)? After all, as Derrida notes in Glas (1974), his own queer reading of that odd couple Hegel and Genet, “The Aufhebung, the economic law of absolute reappropriation of the absolute loss, is a family concept” (133). It is a family concept, Derrida notes, precisely because of what he calls the “child-relief” (Glas 133):

[T]he parents, far from losing or disseminating themselves without return, “contemplate in the child’s becoming their own relief.” They guard in that becoming their own disappearance . . . . The child-relief of the loss [perte] . . . . The Aufhebung is the dying away, the amortization, of death. That is the concept of economy in general in speculative dialectics. Economy: the law of the family, of the family home, of possession . . . . [T]his guarding retains, keeps back, inhibits, consigns the absolute loss or consum(mat)es it only in order better to reg(u)ard it returning to (it)self.

(Derrida, Glas 133–4)

What is interesting here is how, in Derrida’s rhetoric, this child-relief begins to resemble a fetish. It is as if the “child-relief of the loss,” as Derrida puts it, becomes a kind of fetish object for the parents, “their own relief” from death, from castration, from loss.¹⁶ Can we say, then, that what Freud encounters in Jensen’s little romance is the story of a man who prefers a bas-relief to a child-relief, i.e., prefers a dead thing to reproductive futurity and its fetish? But, then, what is the difference between sublimation and fetishism in this case? Suddenly, taking the side of things in an effort to critique the reproductive futurity of the romantic couple seems naïve when the fetish object appears at the very heart of the speculative economy of heteronormativity (the family circle: daddy-mommy-baby).

 
Consider, then, the recent debates on the (im)possibilities of lesbian fetishism in the journal differences, provoked largely by the volatile figure of the butch-femme couple. As Chris Straayer notes, “early lesbian-feminists rejected the lesbian butch for her unconventional public personal style . . . [because] a butchy appearance seemed to communicate a direct imitation of heterosexual practice via mannish signifiers [mimetic fetishes]” (275).¹⁷ Judith Butler’s essay “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (1992) not only implicitly critiques this rejection of the butch—i.e., her supposed “defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity” (86)—but it also paves the way for Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), which attempts to explicitly valorize the specificity of lesbian sexuality as fetishistic (de Lauretis 317).¹⁸ And yet, while acknowledging de Lauretis’s ability “to explain both the similarities and the differences between butch and femme sexual positions using her account of lesbian fetishism” (“Labors of Love” 165), Elizabeth Grosz states in her review of de Lauretis’s book:

I remain worried . . . about the strategic value of a notion like the “lesbian phallus,” “lesbian dildos,” and virile display: while they do have the effect of unsettling or disquieting presumptions about the “natural” alignment of the penis with social power and value, they do so only by attempting to appropriate what has been denied to women and to that extent remain tied (as we all are) to heterocentric and masculine privilege. Such modalities . . . still presuppose the normative (heterosexual) complementarity in lesbian couplings.

(Grosz, “Labors of Love” 170)

In other words, even (or perhaps especially) in the case of lesbian fetishism, there remains a normative assumption of the romantic couple, in which, as Grosz points out, the lesbian’s “love-object is not an inanimate or partial object [as it is for males, according to Freud]; it is another subject. Her ‘fetish’ is not the result of a fear of femininity, but a love of it” (“Lesbian Fetishism?” 153). It’s as if lesbian fetishism—no less than the child-relief— ultimately props up (relève) a human couple (the butch-femme).¹⁹ Or as Gayle Rubin puts it in her critique of such psychoanalytically-inflected readings of lesbian fetishism:

When I think about fetishism I want to know about many other things. I do not see how one can talk about fetishism, or sadomasochism, without thinking about the production of rubber, the techniques and gear used for controlling and riding horses, the high polished gleam of military footwear, the history of silk stockings, the cold authoritative qualities of medical equipment, or the allure of motorcycles . . . To me, fetishism raises all sorts of issues concerning shifts in the manufacture of objects . . . or ambiguously experienced body invasions . . . If all of this . . . is reduced to castration or the Oedipus complex . . . I think something important has been lost.

(85)

Are we are doomed, then, to simply oscillate like Gradiva’s two feet in a humanist metaphysics of fetishism and its couples (person/thing; subject/object; animate/inanimate), reduced to merely switching allegiances between the two? Isn’t this itself a bit like fetishism, in the same stroke denying and affirming the cut—the de-cision (castration)—in a series of substitutes, as if hanging by a thread (hair), or a hyphen (bas-relief, child-relief), end-lessly (de)feeted?
 
As we have seen, Hanold’s inability to come to life without the mediation of a lifeless thing seems to be no less of a hairy situation. But, as I have argued, not only does the hyphenated word “bas-relief” both set up and upset Freud’s concept of sublimation, but this failure of erection already repeats Hanold’s defeat in realizing his romantic copulation with Zoë at the end of Jensen’s novel. Which is to say, sublimation’s defeat ironically repeats the (de)feet of a bas-relief, whose arrested and arresting two feet rise and fall without end or relief, endlessly (dis)placing the elevated supremacy of the two in a queer double-movement. And the irony of this defeat, as Barbara Johnson suggests in her reading of commodity fetishism in Marx’s Capital, is unavoidable. When Marx, for example, describes the supposed fetishistic transformation of a table (use-value) into a commodity (exchange value), he states:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing . . . [but] analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing . . . [T]he table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

(Marx, qtd. in Johnson 141)

Changed into a commodity, the table suddenly “steps forth” like Gradiva, standing not only on its feet, but on its head. As Johnson points out, however, the problem with this fantastic scenario of fetishistic transformation is that a table is “anthropomorphic from the start” (142). We already refer to the legs of a table, for example, and this figurative anthropomorphism is irreducible. Or as Johnson states, Marx can only “play around with an existing figurative structure” (142); Marx can no more eliminate this trace of anthropomorphism from language than Freud can eliminate the queer double-movement of (de)feet from Hanold’s romantic copulation with Zoë.

 
What is queer about Gradiva, then, is not fetishism, but the specter of a “general fetishism,” as Derrida calls it (Glas 210), or what Hanold calls “Zoë-Gradiva,” whose lifeless life threatens to deconstruct the very opposition between the organic and the inorganic, the real and the artificial, the living and the dead, the thing itself and the substitute. A “general fetishism,” as Derrida argues, “no longer lets itself be contained in the space of truth, in the opposition Ersatz / nonErsatz, or simply in the opposition” (Glas 209). Indeed, since fetishism always assumes that “[s]omething—the thing—is no longer itself a substitute,” as Derrida writes, “if there were no thing, the concept fetish would lose its invariant kernel” (Glas 209). What Derrida suggests here, as Geoffrey Bennington and Sarah Kofman point out, is a kind of queer double-movement.²⁰ According to Bennington:

[T]wo essential moments . . . structure Derrida’s remarks about fetishism: the first consists in a reconstruction of a “classical logic,” in which the fetish is defined against something not of the order of the fetish (“the thing itself,” the real thing, and so on), and the second in a generalization of the fetish. This movement of generalization is itself not simple, or at least does not simply or immediately consist in claiming that “everything is a fetish” . . . but [it does posit] an economy of fetishism, in which, for example, it might be strategically justified to claim that the supposed “thing itself,” which the “classical logic” opposed to the fetish, is itself the real fetish . . . . This slightly abyssal perspective awaits us.

(185–6)

Or as Derrida writes: “a fetishism . . . unfolds itself without limit” (Glas 210), unfolds like an uncanny fabrication. It is not surprising, then, that “the sex appeal of the inorganic” is something Benjamin formulated while contemplating fashion (folds, cosmetics, gloves): “the body experienced . . . not [as] a machine, but [as] clothing . . . made up of many types of fabrics juxtaposed and interwoven among themselves” (Perniola 10).

 

 
Click for larger view

Fig. 5.

René Magritte, Le modèle rouge (1934). Photo courtesy of Herscovici/Art Resource © 2012 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
 

 

This is, no doubt, a feat Benjamin shares with Magritte (Fig. 5), but also, I think, with Hanold, whose pedestrian investigations into the lifeless life of a bas-relief (“Zoë-Gradiva”) open a “slightly abyssal perspective [that] awaits us.”