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

This paper interrogates self-subjugation and the putative dichotomy of freedom/unfreedom in works by Dominique Aury, Emily Dickinson, and Chris Kraus, opening the door to new considerations of relations between the erotic and the mystical. Histoire d’O (1954) has frequently been compared to works of Christian mysticism, predicated on the assumption that both the subjected erotic heroine and the mystic abnegates her ‘self’ in relation to an all-powerful Other. Drawing from Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, I argue that the relation between the protagonists of these erotic texts and Christian writers such as Teresa of Avila is rather that both assume the role of the bride in the Song of Songs: by addressing themselves entirely to absent masters, they fragment hierarchized distinctions of self/Other and freedom/unfreedom, thus laying bare the inextricability of lover and beloved, and standing in hungry, desirous relationality to artmaking, to others, and to language itself.