Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

Among the many fruits that Freud affectionately filched from Salomé's ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”,’ we find the idea that the vagina is taken ‘on lease’ (p. 28) from the rectum. Freud mentions this in his discussion of a rather general equivalence between the anus and the vagina: they are both membranous passages through which objects (like feces, babies, and penises) may enter and pass (Freud, 1917). Infantile anal pleasure is thus a kind of harbinger of later vaginal enjoyment. Disquieting as this comparison might seem, it is the metaphor of the ‘lease’ that is most striking. The financialization of body parts summons another relation that Freud establishes in the same essay: the association between feces and money.

Freud explains that children equate feces with a gift because it is, after all, the first object that they can give - or more importantly, withhold and save for later. By extension of this association, children come to equate feces with gold or money as something valuable. Money, like shit, is something that one can either keep for oneself or spend and release into circulation. It is, of course, the latter choice that seems to please the (m)Other. This point echoes Freud's earlier claim that parsimony, along with obstinacy and orderliness, is a defining feature of the anal character. In other words, the anal character usually knows how to pinch a penny.

If feces are invested with a certain economic significance as money, is this perhaps the tender in which the so-called ‘lease’ the vagina takes out is written? Although Andreas-Salomé does not emphasize the monetary metaphor herself, in ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ she formulates the notion of the transformation of the drive from anal to genital in terms of a lease. As Andreas-Salomé puts it in the original articulation, ‘It is not for nothing that the genital apparatus remains the neighbor of the cloaca (and in the case of women is only taken from it on lease)’ (p. 28). So, what is the connection betwe