How Can It Be I Am No Longer I: Mysticism, Eroticism, and the Dissolution of Un/Freedom

In his introduction to Histoire d’O (1954), writer and editor Jean Paulhan marvels at the then-anonymous author of the infamous erotic novel: what kind of woman, he asks, would want to be Justine? Critics of O, feminists and moralists alike, have for decades decried the novel’s depiction of feminine self-subjection, the titular O’s readiness to prostrate herself to blows and bondage; surely, the French public speculated, the writer behind the pseudonym “Pauline Réage” couldn’t be a woman. Paulhan, however (who knew perfectly well the author of O was his lover, Dominique Aury, born Anne Desclos), draws on Alexander Kojève’s influential reading of G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft in celebrating the “bonheur dans l’esclavage.” By surrendering her will to that of others, Paulhan argues, O finds herself “at last rid of selfish pleasures, interests, and personal complexes”—he writes that O, like all lovers, “[rants] and [raves] against freedom,” having achieved a trembling, unfree pleasure-pain in opposition to and beyond freedom.

Paulhan, like novelist André Pieyre de Mandiargues in his preface to the later English translation of O (1965, Grove Press), notably compares O’s attainment of ecstatic unfreedom to that of the Christian mystics. My paper argues that the Christian mystical ascent is central to O and to other texts of erotic self-abasement written by women—but this is not because either Christian mysticism or abject eroticism enact that familiar Hegelian narrative. These are not accounts in which subjugation engenders a transcendent role-reversal, in which the subjugated ascends to an ‘unfreedom’ beyond ‘freedom.’ Rather, in Histoire d’O, as in Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters (1858-1862), and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997), the woman speaker or protagonist draws on resources from Christian mystical writers such as Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila: she addresses herself wholly to an absent master in order to make art that that fragments the freedom/unfreedom dichotomy, thereby laying bare the inextricable interrelation of self and other, in which power, love, hate, apathy, and care are never fixed or monodirectional but ceaselessly motile and diffuse.

Just as students of medieval Christian mysticism are often struck by the erotic nature of seminal works, such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (12 c.), the mystical elements of O have been widely observed beyond the aforementioned introductions. Critic Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), notes that O’s striving to “[transcend] personality” unfolds the “spiritual paradox” found in the mystical works of authors including Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Angela: “the full void and… the vacuity that is also a plenum.” Scholar of French literature Dorothy Kaufmann calls O a “work of pornographic mysticism”; indeed, Kaufmann and others have pointed to Aury’s intense interest in the mystical works of the late seventeenth- to early-eighteenth century abbé François de Fénelon. In an essay on Fénelon titled “Le pur amour” (1958), Aury writes, “Profane love and sacred love are the same love, or should be. Only the object changes, if one can admit that it is decent to use the word object for God.” My paper, however, will particularly focus on the gesture made by Mandiargues in his preface: that Histoire d’O essentially treads the path of the five-step mystic ‘way’ classified by Evelyn Underhill in her seminal Mysticism (1911), which proceeds from awakening of self, to purgation of self, to illumination, the soul’s dark night, and finally to union—such that creativity is born of the mystic’s self- and God-knowledge.

I will argue that Aury, Dickinson, and Kraus posit a master necessarily in absentia such that each writer is able to speak herself—to write. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “hysteric’s discourse” in his Seminar XVII (1969-1970), as well as Immanuel Kant’s postulates of practical reason—that is, that while we cannot prove God, we must posit God in order to be moral actors—I suggest that the erection of an unknown and unknowable beloved, psychically vested with near-divine omnipotence, makes it possible for each writer to extend herself to extremes of human affect and sensation, desperation; it allows her to slip in and out of the various costumes of femininity, as Heloise does in the letters to Abelard in which she performs the roles of Eurydice and Dido, or declares that she is his “concubine” and “whore.” Each author, like so many Christian mystics before her (Bernard, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Mechthild of Hackeborn, etc.), becomes the bride of the Song of Songs: a forever-search for one’s beloved provides the grounds from which to speak continuously, to say “I am looking for you,” which is also to say “I am” and “I am in relation to you.” These texts thus illustrate that the relationship between the pornographic and the mystical, between the profane and the sacred, is not in either case simply that the “I” is evacuated of herself, nor that un/freedom has arisen—though pleasure, laced with pain, certainly has. Reagé/Aury’s O, Dickinson’s speaker Daisy, and Kraus’ protagonist Chris parallel Christian mystical writers in their limerent graphomania: they subsume and are subsumed by their absent beloveds, making visible the multiple, diffuse, fragmented self who writes herself into a state of perma-frisson, ever on the verge of overwhelm, such that she can stand in hungry, desirous relationality to artmaking, to others, and to language itself.