Desiring the Dead

by Lisa Downing

In the 19th century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. Drawing case material from the 19th-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with key European texts of sexology and psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, and feminist critiques of the masculine morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in 19th-century France and beyond.

Genres: France, Death, Art

156 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

Reviews

[Dr. Sionainn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Downing uses Freud wayyyyyy too earnestly for a serious theorist working after the 1970s/80s, and her deliberate skirting of the gendered nature of necrophilia with regard to subject/object dynamic really annoyed me. On one hand, she acknowledges the dead female body is fetishized in 19th century France on an unprecedented scale (to the extent that it became banal enough to become literary and plastic cliché). On the other, she attempts to argue that necrophilia is gender-equal and approaches the subject as though there were no systemic social issues at play in the disorder. Downing argues that both men and women are necrophiliacs, but fails to account for the fact that Rosman and Resnick (1989) found 92% of surveyed necrophiliacs were men, and only 8% women. She mentions this nowhere and ignores the data that is present on the subject (albeit there's not much).

Downing operates from the working basis that necrophilia is merely an extreme manifestation of the universal attraction towards experiencing death by enacting one's own demise through displacement on another. This working theory is interesting and substantiated in some aspects, but it's left so vague and unexplored that it can feel like empty Freudian nonsense. This is made clearest in her treatment of the historical case of Sergeant François Bertrand, which was the cause célèbre at the time and fueled very fierce debate among intellectuals and artists. She briefly mentions it, but then continues on without much explanation of how transformative it was with regard to the natural sciences and art.

Again, reverting back to Freud, Downing hinted she avoided situated social realities (misogyny, racism, heteronormativity etc) to better hit at a 'universal primal state', which is both mythical and debunked by modern scholars. This is classic Freudian analysis, and, to be honest, we're way past it at this point.