L’experience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture par Serge Zenkine

Abstract

Reviews 241 production. In three chapters and a coda, she attempts to rehabilitate his reputation as an author of bad books“in both senses of the term”(1). She aims at demonstrating his contributions to modern knowledge of sexology as well as to the place of human sexuality in psychiatry. She shows how fiction influenced science and psychiatric medicine in the late nineteenth century and beyond and how scientific ideas, prompted through Enlightenment thought and perhaps pure genius, found their way into novels. In chapter 1, Wyngaard examines the difficulty in defining the term pornography, literally meaning writing about prostitutes. Censors were even confounded as to what was considered pornographic/obscene and what was not. Interestingly, one of Rétif’s earliest works, Le pornographe (1769) is not pornographic but constructively addresses the regulation of prostitution. She further details how he doggedly tested censorship boundaries with Le paysan perverti (1775) and eventually La paysanne pervertie (1784), its “semiauthorized soft porn” complement (7). Chapter 2 juxtaposes Le pornographe with Rétif’s single truly pornographic work, L’anti-Justine (1798), a response to the literary excesses of his rival, the Marquis de Sade. Modern pornography owes its invention to these two works. Chapter 3 treats the concept of fetishism, another contribution of Rétif, this time to the catalog of deviant sexual behaviors. Rétif had a special predilection for shoes and tiny feet. The final section concerns La découverte australe (1781), a work of science fiction that foretells sexual behavior through theories of eugenics. From a feminine perspective, Rétif’s major achievements were to make vicarious sex available through the framework of the sentimental novel and to demonstrate that women were capable of enjoying sexual pleasure as much as men. They were not portrayed as victims of Sadean brutality or male privilege. Rétif’s illustrator, Louis Binet, attested to this in several of his images displayed throughout the book, including the one on the cover. Thus, Rétif made pornography available to women and helped prepare the way for the twentieth-century “feminist antipornography movement” (66) as well as its counterpart, the advocacy of porn for women as beneficial for their sexual well-being. Wyngaard draws attention to Rétif’s far-sighted view of female sexuality, though, like Sade, he incorporated incest into the pleasure equation. Independent Scholar Ivy Dyckman Zenkine, Serge. L’expérience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0256-2. Pp. 244. 37 a. This intriguing book argues that the notion of one’s culture as a contingent construct, one among others of equal or at least comparable status, first emerged in France during the Romantic period. This idea“est intimement liée à une transformation et une redistribution du sacré,” which the author summarizes in the following way: “L’unité substantielle du sacré s’affaiblit pour céder la place à la pluralité des formes; la destruction sacrificielle est refoulée [...] au profit des objets fabriqués, des artefacts matériels s’opposant aux textes abstraits et spirituels”(50). One might think that the Enlightenment had already fulfilled much of this program, but the author argues that the key step toward cultural relativism or pluralism (terms he employs interchangeably, but are they really synonymous?) is not the critique of religion as such. Rather, it is a radicalization of the sacred, which puts it beyond any definitive instantiation or interpretation, thereby allowing its existence to be affirmed on a different basis: “La littérature romantique relativise des institutions et des pratiques traditionnelles qui semblent servir normalement à affirmer le Même, et les remet en perspective de l’Autre absolu” (113). There are echoes here of Paul Bénichou’s work, and the choice of exemplary authors is similar to his: the Saint-Simonians, Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, though with the interesting addition of a chapter on “Politesse et traduction,” which argues that the understanding of civility and of the dynamic of translation in Germaine de Staël and other early Romantic writers prepared the way for the acceptance of cultural relativism. There are some excellent examples of critical insight here, in...