Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

Harbinger of a queer theory yet to come, Lou Andreas-Salomé's ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ probes the repulsion, fascination, and endless productivity of anal sexuality. It explores what Leo Bersani would characterize, some seven decades later in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (Bersani, 1987, p. 221) during the AIDS pandemic, as the frenzied epic of displacement and unrelenting panic endemic to (homo)sexuality. Even more, ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ engages with the pervasive disgust and dread of infection associated with both gay men and women who, in Bersani's graphic imagery, ‘spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction’ - indeed, unconsciously invoking in this unholy conflation of anus and vagina ‘the infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman’ (pp. 211-12).

Andreas-Salomé, who was an active participant in Sigmund Freud's Vienna salon from 1912 to 1913, published ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ some five years after the appearance of Freud's essays on dementia paranoides. There, Freud examines the memoirs of the psychotic Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber, the infamous judge and Senate-President of the Dresden Court who indulged precisely in transgendered fantasies of suicidal ecstasy with none other than God himself in the name of eugenic perfection (Freud, 1911). Freud diagnosed the psychotic Schreber as a repressed homosexual - or really more homophobe than homosexual in Eve Sedgwick's trenchant reassessment of the German judge's schizogenic, self-punishing mental gymnastics (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 20).

Notably, the word ‘homosexuality’ is never directly invoked in ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”.’ Nonetheless, Andreas-Salomé's essay has provoked considerable commentary on the manifest ways in which moral rectitude - along with its affective handmaidens, shame and disgust - seeks to suppress anal pleasure by configuring it as the symbol of everything that must be disavowed an