Anna Katharina Schaffner

Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity

This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity.

Burnout, Fatigue, Exhaustion

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Masochism: Franz Kafka and the Eroticization of Suffering

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Pre-Modern Exhaustion: On Melancholia and Acedia

The vast majority of interpersonal relationships in Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) narratives are defined by the dialectic of transgression and punishment, and vacillations between aggression and servility. In Kafka’s rigorously hierarchical universe, subjects never relate to others as equals: his protagonists, exiled from the sacred, alienated from their peers, spiritually, socially and sexually adrift, seem to be able to choose only between the roles of perpetrator and victim. Kafka negotiates the dynamics of domination and submission thematically in many of his texts. Gregor Samsa’s fall into vermin-hood in ‘The Metamorphosis’ (written in 1912, first published in 1915), for example, is related to his submissive personality and his sexual tastes, which are epitomized by the picture of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’ on his wall, the defence of which precipitates his ultimate decline.1 Gregor’s transformation into a crawling creature can be read as punishment for his sexual tastes: his monstrous exterior corresponds to his monstrous interior; his appearance is causally related to his essence.

Homosexuality: Thomas Mann and the Degenerate Sublime

Adopting a cultural-historical perspective, Anna Katharina Schaffner argues that exhaustion is not at all a modern preoccupation, nor the specific bane of our age of techno-capitalism, as many critics argue, but that anxieties about exhaustion and its psychological, physical, and social effects have always been with us. She shows that theories of exhaustion and its corrosive effects can be found in many historical periods, including Greek antiquity and the Middle Ages. The symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion were considered to be among the core symptoms of melancholia, theorised in the broader framework of humoural theory by the physician Galen. An alternative model of exhaustion emerged in Late Antiquity and blossomed in the Middle Ages: the notion of sloth or acedia. Just like melancholia, acedia included various symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion among its core indicators, such as weariness, torpor, apathy, lethargy, sleepiness, irritability, cognitive impairment, and hopelessness. Yet unlike melancholia, which was treated and defined by physicians, sloth fell under the remit of theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas. It was understood not as an organic disease, but rather as a spiritual and moral failing.

Sexology in England: Ellis, Carpenter and Lawrence

With a few exceptions, most early perversion theorists conceived of the perversions as pathologies that were either the direct result of the ramifications of modernity or else a cause for its further decline into decadence. Two similarly incompatible perceptions of sexual deviance exist in the current discourse on the perversions, as Lisa Downing argues: on the one hand, particularly in the context of deconstructive queer theory, perversions are cast as transgressive, destabilizing forces, associated with a revolutionary impulse and thus a radical rather than a liberal politics. On the other hand, perversion is seen as a rigid, conservative fixation, endlessly repeating a predetermined script.1 Downing criticizes reductive and monolithic claims about the ‘nature’ of the ‘pervert’, no matter from which side of the analytic spectrum, for they ultimately reify experience into a category of being and deny specificity and difference. At stake in such claims ‘are both an ethical danger and an epistemological fallacy, which centre on reduction.

The Birth of a Science: From Masturbation Theory to Krafft-Ebing

When comparing French, German and English sexological traditions, it is striking that far fewer studies were written on the subject in Victorian Britain during the early decades of the discipline than were on the Continent. Before Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) published Sexual Inversion in 1897, not a single medico-psychiatric monograph had appeared on the subject of perversion. Ivan Crozier notes that, by and large, ‘British psychiatry was not explicitly concerned with sexual perversion’.1 However, he also challenges the commonly held view that no attention at all had been paid to homosexuality in British medical discourse before Ellis’ publication, whilst conceding that the existing discussion was conservative, apolitical, ‘less theoretically sophisticated and less sexually explicit than Continental sexology’.2 The ‘pre-Ellisian’ British sexological literature Crozier discusses consists exclusively of short essays and reviews, and tends to focus predominantly on homosexuality.3

Fetishism: Georges Bataille and Sexual-Textual Transgression

The architects of pre-modern conceptions of the perversions were ecclesiastical scholars. The most influential of these, the thirteenth-century Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), drew up the core Christian taxonomy of sexual sins in his Summa Theologiae, combining ideas from Augustinian Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy. In his magnum opus Aquinas defines any sexual act from which procreation cannot follow as ‘unnatural vice’. He furthermore divides unnatural vice into different species of lechery. All sins of lechery are, first, in conflict with right reason, and, second, in conflict with the ‘natural pattern of sexuality for the benefit of the species’.1 The species of lechery are self-abuse, bestiality, sodomy (sex with a person of the same sex) and deviations from the natural (genital) form of intercourse such as anal and oral sex. The worst of all the unnatural vices, Aquinas argues, ‘will be that which saps the basis on which all of them rest’.2

The Golden Age of Sexology in Germany: Activism, Institutionalization and the Anthropological Turn

The French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962) — who between 1922 and 1944 worked as a librarian in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, was briefly affiliated with the Surrealists, founded the College de Sociologie and edited a number of journals and reviews, including Documents, Acephale and Critique — might not seem to be a modernist in the strict historical sense of the term, if only because the majority of his oeuvre was published after the Second World War. However, his seminal work Eroticism (1957) is the culmination of intellectual projects begun in the 1920s, and key conceptions that are expounded in crystallized form in that text are already manifest in his earlier works, including Story of the Eye (1928), which will be the focus of this chapter. In Eroticism, Bataille defines eroticism as a psychological and spiritual quest for the continuity of being, which is independent of the aim to reproduce. Human beings, he argues, are discontinuous, in that individuation creates a gulf between the self and the other.

The French Scene: Degeneration Theory and the Invention of Fetishism

In the final years of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries, Germany saw the establishment of numerous scientific committees, the dissemination of journals and almanacs and the compilation of handbooks, all of which were concerned with the propagation of sexological knowledge, sexual hygiene, women’s rights and legal reform.1 German sexology entered into a more collaborative and institutionalized phase, which was brought to an abrupt halt when the Nazis came to power in 1933, forcing many of the predominantly German-Jewish sexologists into exile. Amongst the growing number of German-speaking sexologists active during the Wilhelminian era and the Weimar Republic, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), Albert Moll (1862–1939) and Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) — all of Jewish origins and based in Berlin — were the most prominent and internationally most influential, each putting his distinctive mark on the field.