Niklaus Largier, translated by Graham Harman
IN PRAISE OF THE WHIP
A cultural history of arousal
526pp, illustrated. MIT Press. £22.95.
9781890951658
Hurting oneself goes against all basic common sense. It is hard to understand, and easy to mock or deride. Images of madmen, masochists, or monks beating themselves are stock figures of human stupidity, decadence, or aberration. This is because common sense, as social consensus, has a vested interest in human integrity and intactness, and self-harm offends its most central value. If we want to understand why humans hurt themselves, we have to use something other than common sense. In his book In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier uses the case study of whipping to do so from a historical perspective.
As the title and subtitle already indicate, whipping for Largier is an example of a technique of hurting oneself to induce a state of intense excitement or ecstasy that transcends language and the body. The author stresses that he wants to try to do his topic justice by not pressing a deliberately disruptive practice into a linear, narrative history, but to let each of his texts stand on its own rather than as an example of an overarching development – a laudable aim that has become a bit of a cliché in recent historiography. The trick he uses to resolve the paradox of writing about a practice aiming at incommunicability is to present flagellations as texts, and texts as performances. In Praise of the Whip concerns itself with texts about, not with actual instances of, whipping, and argues that these texts all aim to induce a state in the recipient that mimics the ecstasy of the whipped – a tall claim, which his own volume shares to an extent. Moreover, the flagellated people aim for their bodies to become texts in various ways, to be seen and read, either as a realization of Scripture or as pornography.
Although Largier is careful to give counter-examples, he sees a clear shift around 1700, when the interpretation of the ecstasy of whipping changed from a predominantly ascetic to a predominantly erotic and medical one. Eighth-century hermits might have been the first to practise self-whipping, although the evidence is unreliable. Voluntary self-flagellation first became common in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the monastic orders, where whipping had previously been used only as a punishment. The eleventh-century Benedictine writer St Peter Damian played a crucial role in popularizing this practice. It was incorporated into rituals of penitence and confession, of praying or singing the Psalter, but also into private devotion. The late Middle Ages, Largier’s specialist area, get the most expansive and most sensitive treatment – and perhaps here, whipping came closest to being part of mainstream culture. In 1260/61, flagellation became a mass movement. The city of Perugia, perceiving itself to be in crisis, officially suspended work for a month in order to allow the citizens to repent and whip themselves. A procession went to Bologna, and flagellant processions soon started up throughout Europe, as people everywhere took out a month or longer to repent in this extreme manner. This movement quickly subsided, but flared up once more in 1349/50, partly as a result of the spirit of remorse induced by the Black Death. It then provoked theological criticism, but self-flagellation survived as a private practice, in some secret cults and in theatrical performance. Jesuits and other Catholic theologians reaccredited it in the sixteenth century, this time in the spirit of acknowledging that there are things that cannot be said in words, and that images and performances, like those of flagellation, offer legitimate access to the divine.
A 1703 treatise by Jacques Boileau first expressed the fear that flagellation might have erotic undertones, and from then on, whipping was always suspected of inducing sexual arousal. Openly pornographic texts, like those of the Marquis de Sade and other French eighteenth-century writers, continued the tradition of allowing images and performances – and Largier here counts Sade’s evocatively described tableaux vivants among them – to do what linear narratives cannot, and feed into critique of the Enlightenment’s overemphasis on reason. Even anti-Jesuit and anticlerical texts could now be read as stimulating to the imagination. At the same time, flagellation became a subject for medical investigation. In 1669, Johann Heinrich Meibom published a treatise on the medical uses of whipping for stimulating and balancing bodily and genital fluids, a book which was increasingly read as erotic literature itself. Finally, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fantasy and reality, England emerged as the centre of erotic whipping.
Largier has picked a topic that is relevant as part of the history of sexuality, of the individual, of epistemology and of the body, and he illuminates it interestingly, sometimes brilliantly. But though the underlying history is fascinating, the deliberately unsystematic approach, where long swathes of textual material are left to speak for themselves, left me, at least, less than ecstatic. From an academic point of view, Largier’s overemphasis on whipping as a performance, as opposed to the psychological, social, material and theological aspects of the phenomenon, rather limits his insights. So does his lack of a definition of what distinguishes whipping from other practices of self-harming devotion or sexuality. When this book came out in German in 2001, reviewers immediately took offence (or were delighted) at the deliberately scandalizing title and marketing. In Graham Harman’s solid translation and the volume’s beautiful, if somewhat sloppy, production, both readers seeking titillation and readers seeking knowledge will have to fight their way to find what they are looking for.
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Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. Her book Medieval Blood was published last year.
