The Sexual Market: Three Romantic Moments

摘要

Freedom of response to the unfree imperatives of sexual desire, over against various sacralinhibitions thereof, was perhaps aspired to earlier and more persistently than otherfreedoms in the emergent human market place. Certainly stories of great and greatlytransgressive lovers, of Tristan and Iseult or Abelard and Eloise, or of a multitude of morerecent romantic strainers against social interest and religious control, including latterlyloves daring to speak their own polymorphous (if thus no longer authentically perverse)names, have rather outpaced accounts of the transcendent energies of Captains of Industry,and at least kept up with myths of political and national liberation. And yet, in an endlesslybemusing paradox that has emerged less bluntly for the other categories, it is almost of necessity to the refuge or at least the metaphor of the sacred that the outcomes of such freedom must have recourse. Or so it would seem from the testimonies commonly available. (If Girard and others have dismissed this recourse as “deviated transcendency,”(1) there are many to retort that the deviation goes precisely in the other direction. “If this is a religious experience,” cry such skeptics before, say, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, “We believe we have had it!”) At any rate, liberalization in this area of human experience, as it expanded in the forefront of the transformations of the European eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increasingly represented itself as a resistance to the profanely mimetic forces now operative around the peripheries of an emptying ritual center. As they plunged below or soared above the horizontality of market exchange, however, the celebrants of unmediated love contributed immeasurably to the language with which that market created itself. It is not perhaps an exaggeration to say that proclamations of one’s right and power to follow the arbitrary dictates of romantic desire in the choice of a spouse or sexual partner, and by the same token to resist any and every form of external influence on or limitation of that choice, modeled a posture for the establishment of all subsequent constructions of individual identity and rights. This surely would help explain the early predominance and continuing prominence of the marriage plot in literature and other narrative art throughout the modern period. Given the stakes and intensity of interest involved, it is not surprising that the best artists would also gravitate to this theme and, from the beginning, help articulate the paradoxes and even potential tragedies inherent in this putative emancipation, even while they for the most part accepted its inevitability. This paper will attempt to sketch, from this perspective and in a necessarily preliminary manner, three such accounts, “moments,” little crises in the evolution of desire.