And the Maiden / Prayer Rope / etc

Much of the Summer has been dedicated to my noise music output, accordingly it struck me as a reasonable opportunity to list recent and future releases. I shall endeavour to :

And the Maiden – Obstructing Egress (Not On Label, 2019)

https://soundcloud.com/andthemaiden/sets/obstructing-egress

The first And the Maiden release, Obstructing Egress was a collaborative split, one might say, between myself and Jacob A. Matthews, a sonic Deleuzian contribution to the blue humanities, in direct reference to the gorges and falls of the Ithaca and Finger Lakes area. Jacob’s tracks were based around synths and field recording, whilst my own were sonic manipulations of various tourist home movies filmed at various locations and uploaded to YouTube.

 

Prayer Rope – “Better Soul” (ATTN:SPAN, 2020)

ATTN:SPAN by ATTN:SPAN

As with all other contributions to ATTN:SPAN’s compilation in aid of Cool Earth, “Better Soul” is a ten-second track. Despite its brevity, “Better Soul” was an early nod in the direction of Prayer Rope’s hagiographical construction, making use of heavily treated samples from two modern-day “saints,” who make similar appearances in the next release on this list – Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

 

And the Maiden – Magdalen Burns (SGFF Records, 2020)

Magdalen Burns by And The Maiden

The first physical release, Magdalen Burns was a reflection on the toxicity of the TERF movement, particularly those based in the UK, and the power and beauty of trans and queer communities and organizations. The title is in reference to a mean-spirited retort I made when exhausted having being harangued by a TERF who had the deceased YouTube-based harasser as her twitter profile picture – a comment I immediately deleted and for which I felt ashamed. Nevertheless, the seemingly contagious toxicity of that encounter left a mark on me that I felt required addressing in the first “official” And the Maiden recording. Magdalen Burns was the last digital-based recording, although it also makes significant use of my voice, particularly in the final two tracks, “Knife to My Throat” and “Everything.” What noise is not digitally generated was made through heavily distorted recordings of me crushing and flattening aluminium cans – a trick taught me by one of my best friends, a fellow trans woman. Even such a small, silly thing took on, for me, significant relevance as a diminutive but very sincere avatar for mutual interaction and support between transgender individuals.

 

Prayer Rope – I Saw God in Whom All Creatures are Nothing (SGFF Records, 2020)

I Saw God In Whom All Creatures Are Nothing by Prayer Rope

The title for this, the first physical and first full-length Prayer Rope release preceded the recording by a good many months; indeed, it inspired the establishment of Prayer Rope as a noise project, separate from And the Maiden, even so soon after And the Maiden’s own formation. It also marks the beginning of my current approach to noise production, centered predominantly around use of guitar pedals, a shaker box, a circuit bent portable speaker, and a ten-track mixer. The album and its two 15-minute tracks are named respectively after a paraphrasing and direct quote attributed to mystical theologian Meister Eckhart: “I saw God, in whom all creatures are nothing” and “every creature is a word of God.” Superficially contradictory, the aim of this album was to address these statements from the perspective of the abundance and absence implicit in the apophatic tradition of understanding God (or, particularly for Eckhart, the Godhead) in terms of profound darkness, and the sonic representation of such an ontological enigma. The second track in particular has as the “core sound” a me breathing heavily into a speaker, circuit bent into a microphone, through a feedback-looped effects chain, as a tangible reification of that same breath or “word” of God – an approach that might, in any other context, appear wholly narcissistic. However, I believe this not to be the case in relation to Eckhart’s teachings, in which he stresses overtly a corporeal sense of univocal, ontological reciprocity: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

 

Pink Triangle Series – Janice Raymond (The White Visitation, 2020)

Janice Raymond by Pink Triangle Series

Sean E. Matzus did me the great honour of inviting me to release an album as part of his queer noise agitprop assemblage, the Pink Triangle Series, at the same time as he and his husband Richard Ramirez, who needs no introduction to my regular readers, dropped their newest creations under the name.

Each artist names the recording after and, to one extent or another, bases it around a particular icon of queerphobia and provides with the title a quote of theirs. Rather than drawing from the usual well of Republican preachers, politicians and pundits, I selected the lesbian radical feminist icon, academic and author of the original TERF bible, The Transsexual Empire: Making of the She-Male, Janice Raymond. A little closer to my Prayer Rope approach to production than my And the Maiden, Janice Raymond is an exercise in haunted wall noise, taking particular influence from both Sean and Richard’s solo projects and, above all, Sean’s incredible work as Thin Mountain. The second track contains within the mix me, reading out loud excerpts from the phenomenal responding essay to The Transsexual Empire by the woman most persecuted by and because of that hateful tome, Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”

 

And the Maiden – The Last Mask (Basement Corner Emissions, 2020)

The Last Mask by And The Maiden

This was a release entirely inspired by its own artwork. This striking illustration, printed on the front page of the Dayton Daily newspaper announcing the death of Lon Chaney, titled “His Last Mask” spoke to the fascinating little ironies of covering the life of a man whose life was so closely associated with representations of death. Lon Chaney’s remarkable penchant and skills regarding facial and bodily transformation, earning him the name “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” so excellently illustrated, speaks to the nuanced elusiveness of identity in performance, and the logistical mise-en-abyme or, indeed, feedback loop that is generated under such circumstances. The tape opens with a sample from The Unholy Three, Chaney’s only talkie picture, in which he plays a ventriloquist, hailed – of course – as “The Man of a Thousand Golden Voices.” With Chaney’s own identity thus reintegrated into the narrative, indicative of his unique bridging of the division between the image of the “character actor” and the “star,” transposed to celebrate not simply the still-recent introduction of talkie films, but his introduction to them. Accordingly, the conceptual groundwork for the challenge of engaging in sonic representation of this all but exclusively silent actor felt already laid.

Out Tomorrow: And the Maiden – Magdalen Burns

My new EP under the And the Maiden moniker, Magdalen Burns will be coming out tomorrow through SGFF Records. I’ll be doing a couple of radio interviews in the next week or two to discuss it in full but, suffice to say, Magdalen Burns is a  noise / industrial ambient exploration of the ugliness of the conflict with the TERF movement, and the beauty found in self-actualized queer and trans liberation.

The first run is limited to 10 physical copies, so don’t wait to get one!

 

https://soundcloud.com/andthemaiden/p-o-w-e-r

Album of the Day: Xiu Xiu – A Promise

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Even leaving to one side its recurrent use of dissonant synths and forebodingly driven electronic beats, Xiu Xiu’s A Promise shares with a highly select handful of records, including Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me, or Giles Corey’s eponymous debut, the capacity utilise crushing sadness in such a way that it is at least as effective as distorted atonality, run through a looped effects chain.

Though it may appear a less than obvious comparison, A Promise bears to me a striking similarity to D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle. Both albums display a remarkable variety in generic format and instrumental content, whilst this panoply of styles feel linked enough to function as chromatic dimensions to the prismatic event of a single origin. Both albums make use of lifted conversations between clandestine queers: where Throbbing Gristle used actual audio recordings of gay sex workers, dealing with and discussing rough trade in “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” in A Promise, many of the lyrics in “Sad Pony Guerilla Girl” are ostensibly lifted directly from the conversations of an oblivious lesbian couple, meeting above Jamie Stewart. That such lyrics as

You leave me out on the steps
You dress me up like a boy
You say that I am your secret love
you say to be quiet but
I want to tell the whole world
…
We do it in the back of our little car
Pull up my pants and fix my bra
Go on home, go home to your kids
I’m not going to be quiet and
I’m going to tell the whole block

Clearly indicate the nature of this relationship – closeted, divided by at the very least age, responsibility and class – we can ruminate on the ethics of the archive of queer experience, at a level of recording (in one mode or another) secret conversations and secret identities, when we can also recognise the extremely disparate desires in relation to the secrecy, itself.

Just as D.o.A had “Weeping,” A Promise has its own heart-wrenching acoustic number: a cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Stewart’s mode of address, so often placing himself in the feminine position as he – a queer man – repeats the words of queer women, speaks at once to the paradoxical potentials for unification across all manner of social lines, through isolation, hardship and despair. It is as such that, for all the challenging alternativity of A Promise and Xiu Xiu’s output throughout their career, it is abundantly clear there is not a hint of irony in this song’s rendition. The capacity for finding similarity within difference, through surprising requisition, reappropriation, recontextualisation and reconstitution is, I believe, an expressly queer one.

The vinyl edition I have of A Promise is relatively unique in its design, lacking the infamous candid photograph of a nude Hanoi sex worker by the name of Hang, holding the baby doll that remains in this alternative cover, upside down. Stewart’s own account of the photographs provenance is a remarkable mixture of moving, comedic, uncomfortable and frustrating in its simultaneous presentation of self-consciousness and insensitivity. Stewart’s ultimate philosophy regarding his decision to take the photograph in question, “sometimes, you’ve got to do the wrong thing,” is by no means a denial of the slight sickening response many may have to it. Whether the alternative cover here is the result of bowdlerisation is difficult to determine, but the spartan abstraction of my own edition does bring to mind Tony Just’s series of photographs of empty, sanitized restrooms that were sites of cruising – what Muñoz considered to be the spirit photography of the “ghosts of public sex.” The spectral presence of Hang remains, noticeable in his omission.

 

 

An Urgent Plea to My Readers

Dear readers,

I apologize for a relative reticence in the past while – normal service will be resumed as I complete outstanding work for the end of this semester, as well as some other publications, all of which will make its way to Wyrdsystyr eventually.

However, for the moment, I have a sincere and urgent request for your help.

A couple nights ago, my London home of five years, still home to my partner, Jennie, and our beautiful and beloved cat Rainflower, went up in flames. Thankfully, they both managed to escape with their lives and their health intact, but they are effectively homeless. Jennie’s sister is housing them, a 2 hour-commute away from Jennie’s place of work, with two other cats, when Rainy has spent his life as an only child. Because the flat was privately rented, the building association is denying any obligation to help with their re-homing. Because he considers their contract to be legally “frustrated” by this fire, the landlord has similarly abdicated himself from any such responsibility.

As you know, I am in Ithaca, New York – approximately 3500 miles / 5633 kilometers away from the two lives most precious to me in all the world. The only thing I’ve really been able to do to help is email a local representative, and set up a fundraiser to help with replacing damaged items, compensating for lost work, travel expenses, cat food and assistance with securing a new home for them, if nobody else can be convinced or compelled into accepting the responsibility that is assuredly theirs.
I beg anyone who has ever enjoyed any of my writing, my photography, my DJ sets, my music, to give anything they can to this fundraiser, and share the link on social media, encouraging others to do the same.

I know these are febrile times for us all, and there are many worthy things to which one could donate, but I cannot stress enough how much it means to me.

https://fundrazr.com/c1fYT2

Black, MA – It’s Not the Verdict That Counts; it’s the Act of Judgement

Bob Flanagan and Monsieur M.: Notes On Two Supermasochists

Uncertain if this functions strictly as a “paper,” I describe the following as a series of observations on the conjunctive and disjunctive relation between self-styled “supermasochist,” Bob Flanagan in the posthumous documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Kirby Dick, 1997), and of “Monsieur M.” in Michel de M’Uzan’s 1972 essay, “A Case of Masochistic Perversion and an Outline of a Theory.”

There is no ambiguity during Sick that Bob Flanagan considers his masochistic practices to be entirely indicative of an immense strength on his part. Certainly, we see great parallels here with Monsieur M. of M’Uzan’s analysis, whose own allusions and accounts of “the terrible tortures he had endured” were ultimately descriptions of his own seeming “omnipotence [told with] an immense pride.” (461)

Assuredly, M’Uzan’s interpretation of M.’s masochism feels not too dissimilar from such a case as Venus in Furs, in which “the sadistic partner [is] a person destined to be held in contempt, someone who is devalued as he is reduced to the role of being a specific instrument.” (461) However, there is an ambivalent, albeit extant, relation here to Deleuze’s introduction to the same. For Deleuze, the masochist aims, in being beaten, to embody his father, thus presenting his domineering super-ego avatar to be beaten and accordingly castrated. According to M’Uzan, M.’s desire to be beaten appears to be a desire to be beaten by his father, although also makes clear to us that M did discover his father’s own masochistic desire, whilst also, it seems, denigrating his male sadists all the while. Thus, although we may well surmise the performative embodiment of the father in the masochistic role in the case of M. just as much as in Deleuze’s own speculation, it is difficult to suggest that the function of castrating disavowal of the father is as active in the fantasy.  It is for similar reasons that M’Uzan proposes the category of masochistic perversion, contrasted to moral masochism and/or feminine masochism, due to a lack of concern regarding the super-ego in the case of M.’s desire. Nevertheless, M’Uzan and Deleuze would disagree on the form of concern the moral and/or feminine masochist show in their desire toward the super-ego, suggesting more an identification with the mother, rather than an invocation of her. (462) Accordingly, M’Uzan ultimately concludes that M.’s psychological domain of familial relation is an entirely other landscape:

 

He is like his wife, his wife is like him, she is his parent, he is like his parents, etc. These are not identifications in the active and differentiated sense in which we find them in neurotics, but are purely “duplications.” Under these conditions one must consider his personality as being essentially structured outside the Oedipal situation. (463)

 

Interestingly, when director Kirby Dick interviews Flanagan’s parents about his predilections, his father expresses a certain sympatico with his logic, if nothing else, whilst Flanagan’s mother repeats over and over that she asks herself “where was I?” Flanagan and his dominant long-time partner Sheree Rose express no doubt at all regarding the maternal associations with the dominatrix. Rose is entirely forthcoming in her assertion that to be a dominatrix is in many ways to be a strict mother, one whose consistent, if not constant, giving of punishment and care is reflective of the idealised oral mother. Flanagan’s statement that “I don’t get turned on by slamming my hand in a car door; I don’t get turned on by being treated badly… but I’d ask Sheree to be mean to me.” In this statement we conceive of a triangle, at its points: a hand slammed in a car door, “bad” treatment, and “mean” treatment. We may surmise from this triangle, that each point is roughly reflective of the three women of Masoch: the slamming of the car door is the untameably unpredictable hetaeric, with no regard for context; the potential for “bad” treatment is the castrating Oedipal, actively sadistic and dehumanising; “meanness,” by contrast, is indicative of a role that can be negotiated, even scripted: the oral ideal. The script becomes apparent, as we see a comedic video of Flanagan and Rose, the overhead narration being a letter written to a fictionalised Flanagan’s mother:

“Dear Mom…I fell in love. In some ways, she sort of reminds me of you. I don’t know if it was the clothes she wore, the sound in her voice, or the look in her eye, but I knew I was hooked for life.”

 

Of course, just as we understand the reaching toward the ideal oral mother as not simply being a stationary locus toward which the subject can journey and at which the subject can finally reside, but instead the median point in the perennial oscillation of the subject-as-pendulum, the harmony of Flanagan and Rose’s dynamic as a couple is likewise portrayed at points in flux. The masochist may indeed often operate as the one in control, but here we move from Venus in Furs’ representation of the sullen, aggrieved and resentful masochism of Severin, to seeing outtakes from Flanagan and Rose’s video art, in which he becomes the angry director. Contract signing away all agency of action, decision and sensation of Flanagan’s over to Rose or no, Flanagan expresses his discomfort and displeasure freely and forcefully, if hurt when unprepared, or beaten inaccurately. Flanagan asserts whilst interviewed for his MOMA installation Visiting Hours, “I’m more the mad scientist than the guinea pig.”

As the film chronologically progresses, and Flanagan’s struggles with cystic fibrosis become harder for him to endure, his receptiveness to Rose’s expressed desire to engage in BDSM severely wanes. Rose says to the camera, “I don’t think he’s even a masochist anymore; I think life has beaten him down too much.” Whilst there was no doubt that Flanagan’s masochistic practice was always connected to a sense of battle against his ultimately fatal disease, we now have it presented as him being in the middle between two “beatings.” A submission to one is a disavowal of the other and, accordingly, his ambivalence about his own longevity appears reflected by his portrayed ultimate ambivalence about his lifestyle.

Contrary to the more consistent consideration of heterosexual male masochism presented by Freud and Deleuze, in the case of Monsieur M., his wife was a fellow masochist, and they both relied on male lovers (the ones so contemptuously considered). Instrumentalising these seemingly nameless and faceless others, both masochists were able to dominate and be dominated by each other by proxy, whilst M. certainly also was able to construct and affirm a masochistic identity on the basis of the maleness of these proxies that allowed for nuanced if pragmatic negotiations of gender performance and expression (consider in particular the tattoos Je suis une putain, servez-vous de moi comme d’une femelle, vous jouirez bien and the more non-binary assertion Je ne suis ni homme ni femme, mais une salope, mais une putain, mais une chair à plaisir). Indeed, one possible reason for the contemptuous treatment of male lovers ostensibly afforded so much power as to be able to instruct M. to amputate body parts, is that – outside of the masochistic scene – M. expressed no particular homosexual desire. in fact, the ultimate waning of his masochistic inclinations appears directly connected to heterosexual loss and desire.

We know from M’Uzan’s account that, although it did start up again for some time later, M.’s relationship to masochistic perversion halted abruptly at the death of his wife, who succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis – reportedly, “she endured such extreme torture and was dominated by such intense perverse needs that she wasted all her strength, dying at the age of 23.” (457) The chronology of M.’s sadomasochistic rituals and encounters is ambiguous (as it is, to some extent, with Flanagan – to this we shall return), but we can determine that M. initially disengaged from the masochistic lifestyle for a period of at least two years, following his wife’s death, thus presumably restarting at about age 35, and having ten years of somewhat less successful encounters and relationships, before his interest officially started to diminish, seemingly concurrent to a stark increase in vanilla heterosexual dreams about a “voluptuous woman with whom sexual relationships approached normal love making.” (458) Thus, the cessations to M.’s masochistic inclinations appear instigated by the death of one masochistic woman, and the spectral appearance of another, hetaeric figure. That the first cessation appears marked by a period of sympathetic contraction of the same disease that claimed the life of his young wife should not, I suggest, be considered insignificant. As with Freud’s description of the question of life’s prolongation arisen within the conflict between Eros and the death-drive, the question of death in this case functions as a unifying principle between masochistic parties that appears at once to be in conflict with masochistic desire, but also its ultimate apotheosis of expression.

As with so many other analyses of masochism, the function of suspension, as much as the act, appears central to these examples of masochistic practice. Flanagan recounts to an audience about his early childhood indulgences:

 

Every Friday night… I’d wait ‘til everybody went to sleep, and I’d start to play… I’d pour white glue over my body… Trussed up by these plant hooks… All these ropes, suspending me off the floor.

 

As much as we may interpret the masochistic scene’s close association with binding and suspension as the particular attempt to freeze a particular moment – namely the moment the dominating female partner reaches the apex of cold, oral ideal – we cannot help but first and foremost associate Flanagan’s suspension of time as being directly linked to a desire to prolong a life marked for early death. Indeed, Flanagan credited his masochistic practice for having just such a result, living far beyond his original prognosis. Nevertheless, he also sardonically announces, “I was promised an early death, but here I am forty years later, still waiting.”

As with M’Uzan’s case of M., Dick’s documentary of Flanagan can only be considered approximately chronological, so it is hard to determine what was the “last” masochistic ritual of Flanagan’s before his demise. However, the final we see in Sick, before his deterioration of health is as such that Rose posits that he is “no longer a masochist,” is the infamous video of him, hammering a nail through his penis, into a block of wood. There are perhaps three elements worthy of note when regarding this video: first – just as with those early experimentations – Flanagan is performing independent of Rose or any other dominatrix. Second, nailing his penis to a block of wood likely represents for the majority of us the logical conclusion to the masochistic emphasis on being tightly bound and constricted. Third, the undoing of this act, with the resultant blood streaming from Flanagan’s penis, operates as the final ejaculation, the suspension now lifted.

Given that we see Flanagan describing the scene to an audience just before the video itself (unless, of course, it was a repeated act), we may assume later modes of play. Nevertheless, the narratological effect of this portrayed as the final masochistic act before Bob’s ultimate succumbing to his cystic fibrosis speaks, I believe, to the enmeshment of the illness with his play: not simply as something disavowed by Bob’s assertion of his own corporeal agency through his choice to go through such extreme feats, but perhaps as the ultimate super-ego who may be bested through the ritualistic process, but in the Deleuzian sense that depends upon its participation. The bloody release represents not simply a willingness to let go of the suspension and accept death, but indicates the end of a session in which the illness itself may be embodied as the anal-sadistic father to be defensively castrated by the oral mother. Perhaps the spectrality of this illness with which Flanagan parodically aligns himself for this act dictates the necessity for such genital mutilation, but we as an audience to the film do see it work. Following his death, Rose shows the camera the fatal phlegm that was in his lungs: now trapped in a plastic container. In choosing to let go, in choosing to die (rhetoric employed both by the nurses and Rose at Flanagan’s deathbed), that ultimate super-ego is made manifest that it may be castrated and, indeed, bound.

 

It is unsurprising, given Indecent’s fundamental conceit of metatextuality, that content, theme and form would be as profoundly interwoven as they are, documenting, re-enacting and, in many respects salvaging the creation of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, its performance and re-writing, and all the social, romantic, juridical and political catalysiations and conflicts surrounding its various productions. 

As with the crucial logics of space in God of Vengeance itself, where questions of identity, responsibility, piety, vulgarity, faith, language and love are vainly delineated by evermore permeable architectural partitions, so too does Indecent reveal borders as containing both within themselves further points of separation, but also many points of access, however illegitimate. Alliances are forged and broken, identities and, indeed actors and roles, exchanged in a way that assuredly parallels Angels in America’s quasi-Hegelianism, but ultimately presents the cultural dialogue between Jewish and Christian, (but also Jewish conservative and Jewish liberal), Europe and the USA (but also Polish and German, Greenwich Village and Broadway) etc as being at least as much a process of recurrence as negation. 

The final lingering scene of queer exhaltation – the embattled “rain scene” – happens, untranslated, in its original Yiddish. Rather than the defiant futurity expressed by – and indeed owed to – of a 1990 man, living with AIDS, announcing the continuation of the Great Work in a post-Soviet world that “only spins forward,” Indecent defiantly looks back to a great work already present in the pre-Soviet world of 1906. Exhausted by all the controversies of translation and its unjust sacrificing in aid of an ultimately fruitless cause, God of Vengeance’s rain scene is celebrated as a moment of culturally specific, undiluted and unapologetically joyful exodus from the concerns of homophobic, antisemitic bias. And yet, it is above all within this moment of wilfully performative solipsism that the holistic phusis of queer love becomes most apparent. 

Indeed, our ever-growing suspicion (however sympathetic) of Asch’s role as author throughout Indecent, from his introductory eyeroll-inducing announcement that he would have no opposition to his wife revealing lesbian tendencies, dependent upon his permission to be an audience to them, to his unwillingness to support his cast as they are indicted for obscenity (crucially, he was not), to his refual to allow further productions of God of Vengeance in light of his pursuit by HUAC, may now indeed contribute to this feeling of liberation. It is by no mistake that the man who has played the various incarnations of Yekel plays the final incarnation of Asch, for Asch is the father of God of Vengeance who likewise similarly spurned his creation. Just as so many queers of so many cultures, colours and creeds have found themselves cast out of their families, Indecent’s presentation of history displays a wholly comprehensive ambivalence towards genealogy. The rain scene’s power at the end is entirely reflective of its parentless status, as indeed it was in God of Vengeance, also. As with the diasporic nature of Jewish and queer identity, to be wholly self-reflexive and wholly universal is by no means a self-defeating contradiction. Infused with the beauty of unrestrained queer love, existing despite a century of controversy, rejection and even genocide, is the declaration אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה. ’Ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh. We remember that “I am what I am” is not only an iconic exclamation of queer self-acceptance, but it is also a name of God. 

Black, MA – There is a Second Golden Hour in the Dark That No One Can See

Throughout God of Vengeance, there is a recurrent motif of the contractual relationship between a gendered understanding of innocence, and ethno-theocratic cultural identity. Certainly, in the introduction of queerness, in the depicted relationship between Manke and Rifkele – above all regarding its emancipatory logic as discussed between the two characters – one can see fit to apply both Emma Goldman’s and Gayle Rubin’s essays entitled “The Traffic in Women” as a means of understanding first the functional continuum between systems of marriage and the maligned representations of sex work (as with Goldman’s initial essay), as well as nods toward a broader structural understanding of the female subject position as delineated in such an economy of signification. Undoubtedly, the spatial architecture of the play’s proceedings speaks to the ultimately frustrated separation of patriarchal concepts of piety and castigated forms of female labour – easily interpretable as respective parallels to the Superego / Symbolic and Id / Real – consequently making the liberationist “rain scene” the fleetingly triumphant Ego / Imaginary. It is within reason to understand this scene as something of a dialectical synthesis between the innocence demanded by the “upstairs” society, and the unbridled disregard for respectability. Indeed, the sexual Aufheben from patriarchal rule we see in this moment, through queer relationality as praxis, occurs both through sublation and supplementation via Manke’s concurrent – indeed, contingent – adoption both of the roles of mother and of bridegroom. Accordingly, family dynamics – both intergenerational / parental and intragenerational / spousal – are at once disavowed in their prior mode of application, revealed as little more than dispositifs of performative function, and then repurposed as such for a new economy of same-gender affection.

Manke’s address to Rifkele, reliant as it is on aqueous imagery in its romance, feels pointedly reminiscent of the Song of Solomon aka Song of Songs, whose eroticism has throughout history resulted in its performance in taverns and brothels as well as by observant Jews during Pesach. Crucially, then, we can interpret an expressly spiritual dimension to this affair: invoking a “Holy of Holies” that nevertheless transcends borders of respectability and indeed, even in its official religious application, uses the language of desire to indicate an Exodus: first from Egypt, and now from Yekel.

Returning, however, to the question of space: if we hold with the notion of the upstairs apartment, downstairs brothel, and street outside as representing the various components of the Borromean knot, we might well accordingly interpret Rifkele’s exodus from the Symbolic patriarchal order as being also an exodus from language – not least of all the function of language to delineate the moral parameters of her position within the traffic of women, including and especially the piety so hypocritically demanded of her by her parents. Thus, Rifkele’s uncertainty how to respond to Yekel’s interrogation of her virginity is not merely reticence. Rather, the language of patriarchal order bears next to no meaning for queer discourse and, in kind, queer discourse appears untranslatable to the language of patriarchal order.

The dominant narrative within Venus in Furs – Severin’s autobiographical text-within-the-text – in its opening scene, presents Severin’s journey within a few pages from a devoted and seemingly public worship of the “cold, cruel” statue of Venus, to the far more clandestine fascination with a procured photograph of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, to the immediately horrified response to seeing first the statue adorned with furs, and then Wanda, similarly attired. Certainly, the synthetic operation at play here is on one level an entirely uncomplicated function of the Hegelian dialectic that so influences Masoch’s personal philosophy. However, the intermingling of Severin’s horror and desire is what catalyses the parameters of this text’s analysis, from both a Freudian and Deleuzian perspective.

There is a stark immediacy in the fetishistic function within this scene, such that the instigating stimulus for the horrified reaction to the revelation of maternal castration is, in fact, the erotic object of the realisation’s disavowal, which is to say the furs. Accordingly, I am reminded in this encounter yet again of the “dangerous” supplementation of the Symbolic order, that which – through its imposition of language upon the Real which itself lacks nothing, establishes an absence that must now be healed. This horrific encounter soon follows Severin’s rumination, first on Samson and Delilah, and then on the Book of Judith. Interestingly enough, the two editions of Venus in Furs I possess have divertingly distinct translations regarding the beheading of Holofernes: one reads “The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman,” whilst the other: “The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.” Accordingly, the uncertainty between these two positions of smiting and deliverance feel entirely borne out in the ambivalence of the encounter, and indeed the novel’s resolution.

Nevertheless, we can interpret in both accounts, a degree to which the role of woman can supplant the classically considered punishing patriarch and, in so doing, can render even capital punishment a source of jouissance for the masochist. From such a perspective, Deleuze’s assertion that the masochistic route toward pleasure is to portray his patriarchal superego, so that it may be castrated by the figure of the oral mother, having both defeated and acquired attributes of the hetaeric and oedipal mothers (whom we might understand as the overtly deistic / Titian-painted Venus, and the marble statue Venus, respectively), is affirmed. Indeed, Severin, speaking to himself so harshly during his flight response indicates the splitting mechanism upon which so much of this process is dependent.

Freud’s “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” which seems so overtly to influence Deleuze’s commentary, in all its cultural critique, makes central two plays of Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. Assuredly, this scene in Venus in Furs is also highly indicative of a third: The Winter’s Tale. Freud tells us that, ultimately, the third mother is above all “the Mother Earth who receives [the subject] once more…the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms.” Yet again, smiting and deliverance are inextricably married. And yet, just as with The Winter’s Tale, here we see a statue come to life. Severin’s demanding fantasy necessitates that a figure of death become a figure of life. Within the vain folly of this prerequisite lies the source of the frustrated resentment that so permeates the relationship between Severin and Wanda.