(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DIANNE CHISHOLM
Benjamin’s “perverse” might be most closely associated with Freud’s
“uncanny,” as a category of unnerving perception and experience. Yet it
shares little correspondence with Freud’s theories and categories of sexuality.
Since Benjamin’s perverse images of gender, sex, and Eros function as
(or in) “thought-images” or “dialectical images” that rethink and resist contemporary
idealizations of things-most-valued, things-worthy-of-love, they
should be regarded as critical devices through which to scrutinize sexual,
cultural, and social modernity. Freud, on the other hand, delineates sexual
categories in an attempt to define human sexuality discursively and thus to
institute a new medical-scientific scheme for organizing contemporary clinical
and metapsychological understanding of sexual phenomenology. Consequently,
Benjamin’s “perverse” but not Freud’s “sexuality” (nor, for that
matter, any Victorian sexology) escapes Foucault’s critique of the discursive
hypostatization and regimentation of sexuality, since Benjamin (unlike Freud
and the sexologists) uses, or demonstrates the use of, language to trouble
reified (bourgeois) sexuality. Both Freud and Benjamin understand “perverse
sexuality” as any sexuality that does not aim at and result in conjugal and procreative
heterosexuality, and while Freud regards homosexuality as perverse
but non-pathological, Benjamin perversely ascribes to lesbianism a “heroic”
resistance to instrumentalized Eros (compulsory heterosexual love and procreation).
Moreover, Benjamin, but not Freud, characterizes anthropological
modernity as universally perverse, despite humankind’s deluded, if eternal,
belief in and overvaluation of the naturalness and normalcy of procreative
heterosexuality and heterosexual love.
The images of hermaphroditism that punctuate Benjamin’s thinking
on how modernity transforms (and transsexualizes) relations between the
sexes may receive some inspiration from Freud’s theory that adult sexuality
derives from an embryonic bisexuality. Benjamin, however, mostly
draws his hermaphrodite from symbolic, poetic, mystic, cabalistic, utopian,
and other sources in esoteric literature and not from scientific literature
that tends to ascribe hermaphroditism to organic, genetic, and
psycho-somatic causes. Despite his express fascination with transvestism
and transsexuality — as, for instance, in his childhood recollection of a
female “prostitute in a very tight-fitting white sailor’s suit” 13 — Benjamin
indicates no familiarity with groundbreaking research on “sexual intermediaries”
conducted by his contemporary and fellow Berliner, Magnus
Hirschfeld. It becomes the task of another Benjamin — Harry Benjamin,
Hirschfeld’s student — to develop and popularize the medical etiology
and social recognition of “transsexualism.” Benjamin (Walter) demonstrates
little interest in the medical-juridical concept and treatment of
transsexualism, though the recurrence of transsexual images in his writing
invites one to read him in the context of modern sexology to at least
understand how Benjamin’s writing creatively, critically, and perversely,
diverges from sexual science.