This book presents extensively revised versions of ten essays written in the last twelve years or so, building on two earlier books of mine, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis and Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” Case, both published in 1996. In revising texts that were written separately for different forums, I have tried to indicate some of the relations between them. As I explain in the introduction, certain themes recur; in particular, I have tried to present some aspects, though not all aspects, of a coherent intellectual genealogy and a distinct cultural history. Still, this book is conceived as a series of essays that can be read as freestanding treatments of their subjects. Therefore I have not tried to render each chapter fully consistent with the others, to reduce them to a single argument, or to extract overarching conclusions from them. Instead I hope to have indicated arenas in the history of art and aesthetics, the history of science and psychology, and the history of philosophy and anthropology in which the theme of sexuality and aesthetics (of sexuality in aesthetics, of aesthetics as sexuality, of the aesthetics of sexuality, of the sexuality of aesthetics) might be pursued. Several chapters will be complemented by a book on homoerotic aesthetics and the fine-arts tradition from 1750 to 1920; it will be published soon, I hope, under the title “The Transcendence of Imitation.” And they are related to a number of articles on art-historical topics that I have already published, cited, where appropriate, here.
Students in several courses at the University of California at Berkeley (especially in undergraduate lecture courses on “Queer Visual Culture” and “Homoeroticism and the Visual Arts” that I have taught several times since 2001 and in graduate seminars on aestheticism, the history of art theory, and the history of sexuality) have heard many of the ideas discussed in several chapters. They responded with comments and questions as well as fascinating projects of their own. My teaching assistants, Anthony Grudin, Jeremy Melius, and Justin Underhill, contributed immensely to the courses and therefore to the consolidation of the arguments presented here. I am grateful to Lydia Goehr, Gregg Horowitz, and Noell Carroll, editors of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, and to Wendy Lochner of Columbia University Press for their encouragement, suggestions, and support. Two reviewers for the press provided detailed comments that helped steer my final revisions. An extensive secondary scholarship has accrued to many of the topics that I address in this book, and I have benefited from the advice of many readers and interlocutors. In order to keep the text to a manageable length, however, I have not been able to cite all the relevant contributions or to register my points of agreement or disagreement with each one of them. My many scholarly debts will be obvious to specialists.
A slightly different version of chapter 1 is being published in Beauty Revisited, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Wax Tokens of Libido” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, edited by Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008): 107–29. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Schopenhauer’s Ontology of Art” in Qui Parle 15, no. 1 (2005): 63–80. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “Decadence and the Organic Metaphor” in Representations 89 (2005): 131–45. Very different versions of parts of chapters 7 and 8 appeared as “Freuds Leonardo und die Kultur der Homosexualität” in Texte zur Kunst 5, no. 17 (1995): 56–73, and “Narzissmus in der homoerotischen Kultur und in der Theorie Freuds” in Männlichkeit im Blick: Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004): 213–32. All of this matter has been considerably expanded and extensively revised for publication here.
I wish to dedicate these essays to Brent Adams. He has accompanied me—and instructed me and corrected me—in many of my real-life forays in many of the topics addressed in the abstract in the chapters that follow. He must be right in his usual view that the abstraction doesn’t help anyone. But it doesn’t hinder them either. So we’re even.
San Francisco and London, August 2008