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Beyond the Legality Principle: Sacher-Masoch’s Economies of “Jewish Justice”

2011; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/lal.2011.23.3.442

1541-2601

Erica Weitzman,

Law in Society and Culture

AbstractIn Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s short story “Frau Leopard,” one of the author’s many popular tales of Jewish life, a town’s local anti-Semite gets his comeuppance after he falls in love with the beautiful Jewish widow of the title. He thereby enters into a system of desire, displacement, and revenge that Sacher-Masoch, in one of the tale’s three subtitles, curiously names “Jewish Justice.” Although Sacher-Masoch’s vision of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Poland is clearly no more than pure fantasy, the story’s farcical plot nevertheless constitutes a real engagement with the questions of law, justice, fairness, contract, retribution, and citizenship that also lie at the core of both Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a discussion about the latter of which also marks the turning point of Sacher-Masoch’s own tale. In direct contrast to both the drama and the political treatise, Sacher-Masoch’s exoticizing and eroticizing of Jewish culture, or rather of minority and marginalization per se, act as a way to bypass normative demands in favor of perverse pleasure, and from this to attempt an answer to the problem of how to exercise justice in the absence of transcendent authority.Keywords: Leopold von Sacher-MasochThe Merchant of VeniceJews in Europecontractdebtsado-masochismjusticerevenge Notes1. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), IV.i.308–21 [Google Scholar].2. Id. at I.iii.6.3. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Mrs. Leopard,”in Jewish Life: Tales from Nineteenth-Century Europe, trans. Virginia L. Lewis (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2002), 88 [Google Scholar]; originally published as “Frau Leopard,” in Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Mannheim: J. Bensheimer, 1892; reprint Dreieich: Weiss, 1986), 149. References will be to both the translation and the original, respectively.4. Sacher-Masoch’s reference is to the Vita di Sisto V. Pontefice Romano of Italian historian Gregorio Leti (called Lotti in the tale). With the obvious and important exception of the crossed religious roles, Leti’s anecdote is in almost every respect similar to the central intrigue of The Merchant of Venice, including the pope’s stipulation that Secchi may claim his debt only on the condition that the pound of flesh be exactly weighed—although Leti’s text, significantly, specifies that said pound of flesh is to be the genitals, and not the heart, as in Shakespeare’s version. Different, too, is the final outcome of the story, in which the Pope sentences both Secchi and Ceneda to death—quickly commuted to a fine—for making such a dishonorable and foolish bet in the first place. Of interest for the purposes of the present article is that Leti’s story also lays stress on the metaphorical nature of the wager, stressing that Ceneda’s “I’ll bet a pound of my flesh” is initially only a mere figure of speech, one which the hot-blooded Secchi takes all too literally. Leti’s history was translated into German in 1706 as Leben des berühmten Pabsts Sixti V (Leipzig: Thomas Fritsch, 1706), XI, 344–54 [Google Scholar]. Ellis Farneworth’s revised English translation of Leti’s book, meanwhile, appends the following footnote: “The scene betwixt Shylock and Antonio, in Shakespear’s Merchant of Venice, seems to be borrowed from this story; tho’ the Poet has inverted the persons, and, decently enough, alter’d some of the circumstances.” Gregorio Leti, The Life of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, trans. Ellis Farneworth (London: W. Bowyer, 1754), 293. [Google Scholar] Given the publication date of Leti’s history (it was first printed in 1669; the “pound of flesh” story was only added later, appearing in the 1693 and all subsequent editions) as well as the many linguistic similarities between Leti’s account and the 1596 play, however, it seems unlikely that any such episode in Rome was the actual source of Shakespeare’s drama. It should also be noted that the accuracy of Leti’s scholarship is considered to be generally of some doubt. See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123–26. [Google Scholar]5. Shakespeare’s play bears the alternate and rather more fitting title The Jew of Venice (the titular “merchant” is generally agreed to be not Shylock, but Antonio). See Shakespeare, supra note 1,at 22.6. On the punctum of the pun as “the wound with which the text [of The Merchant of Venice] threatens,” see Anselm Haverkamp, “But Mercy is Above: Shylock’s Pun of a Pound,” in Shakespearean Genealogies of Power: A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), 116. [Google Scholar]7. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 22. [Google Scholar]8. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 79–82 [Google Scholar], on Shakespeare’s staging of “Shylock’s Jewish hermeneutics” and Jews as an “interpretive community”: “the very possibility of imagining a specifically Jewish habit of reading itself exists within the typological framework as an essential if restricted part of its historical vision.” Id. at 82.9. See Shakespeare, supra note 1, at IV.i.59–60.10. Id. at IV.i.99–103.11. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 17–13/15–22.12. Id. at 86/146.13. See Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 47–55, on the three female types in Sacher-Masoch. [Google Scholar]14. See Lupton, supra note 8, at 94.15. See Shakespeare, supra note 1, at I.iii.90.16. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,”’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, & David Gray Carlson, trans. Mary Quaintance (New York: Routledge, 1992), 12. [Google Scholar]17. For a situating of Sacher-Masoch in the paradoxical history of this genre and its reception, see W. G. Sebald, “Westwärts—Ostwärts. Aporien deutschsprachiger Ghettogeschichten,” 233/244 Literatur und Kritik 161–77, 171–74 (1989) [Google Scholar]. The primary “aporia” remarked upon by Sebald is that the literary portrayal of Eastern European Jewish communities in the German language, however much it may be a “consciously untimely homage” (id. at 172, my translation), can nevertheless not be fully separated from the Germanizing project (see id. at 173).18. Albrecht Koschorke takes Sacher-Masoch to task for the inaccuracy of his historical data, complaining (of his portrayal of the eponymous sovereign in his 1900 novel Katharina II. Zarin der Lust [Katharine the Great: Tsarina of Lust]) that “[t]he rulers he wants to portray, that for him are the only ones worth portraying, must be made up of passions and moods… . Power can only be the object of his fantasy insofar as it originates in pleasure [Lust]. Thus he dissolves the logic of national power politics into the characterological-contingent, and dreams up a lawless game of caprices and excesses.” Albrecht Koschorke, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Die Inszenierung einer Perversion (Munich: Piper, 1988), 35 [Google Scholar], my translation. Of course, not only is this precisely the point, but it is also a false criterion for literary value: Shakespeare’s Venetians, for example, can hardly be said to stand up to the test of historical accuracy any better than Sacher-Masoch’s Russian nobles or country Jews.19. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 3/11.20. Id. at 4/12.21. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 12–13/22.22. See Marx, supra note 7, at 26.23. Id. at 22.24. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 85/145.25. Id. at 86/146.26. Id. at 90 (translation modified)/152.27. See Derrida, supra note 16, at 5–6: “Applicability, ‘enforceability,’ is not an exterior or secondary possibility that may or may not be added as a supplement to law. It is the force essentially implied in the very concept of justice as law (droit), of justice as it becomes droit, of the law as ‘droit’ …. The word ‘enforceability’ reminds us that there is no such thing as law (droit) that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ applied by force.”28. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 90/153.29. Id. at 92/154.30. Id. at 92 (translation modified)/155.31. Id. at 92 (translation modified)/155.32. See Deleuze, supra note 13, at 91–102. See also Koschorke, supra note 18, at 87–88. Koschorke, describing the real-life contracts drawn up by Sacher-Masoch, adds, “The logical form of these contracts is structurally equivalent to the logical form of the masochistic perversion” (id. at 88, my translation).33. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 89/150.34. Id. at 91/154.35. Id. at 92/155.36. In 1896—four years after the publication of Sacher-Masoch’s story collection—Jews were formally excluded from honor dueling on the grounds that they were not “worthy of satisfaction” (satisfaktionsfähig). See Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 123–24. [Google Scholar]37. See Deleuze, supra note 13, at 92.38. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. Alan White (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002), §71, 65. [Google Scholar]39. Id. at §81, 72.40. On the contract in The Merchant of Venice as “the legal instrument that regularizes transactions in a social scene whose increasing complexity, mobility, and diversity preclude reliance on traditional forms of trust,” see Lupton, supra note 8, at 75.41. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 86/146.42. Id. at 86/146.43. See Koschorke, supra note 18, at 68. For a cultural history of the “crisis of masculine identity” in turn-of-the-century Austria (surprisingly without reference to Sacher-Masoch), see Jacques le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 99–203 [Google Scholar]. Le Rider, furthermore, considers the “triangle masculine/feminine/Jew” (see id. at 229) to be one of the defining cultural obsessions of Viennese modernism—although the question of whether Sacher-Masoch is symptom or partial cause of this phenomenon must here be left unanswered.44. David Biale reads in Sacher-Masoch’s work “a fascinating philosemitic ideology with a strong polemic for the emancipation of women.” David Biale, “Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” 17/2 Journal of Contemporary History, Sexuality in History 305–23, 313 (1982) [Google Scholar].45. See, e.g., Sean K. Kelly, “Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Human Rights,” 43/3 Modern Austrian Literature 19–37 (2010) [Google Scholar]. Kelly’s attempt to enlist Sacher-Masoch as spokesperson for modern political correctness, although noble, nevertheless does not justify his basic claim that Sacher-Masoch’s œuvre is actually a sustained critique of the masochistic relation.46. See Koschorke, supra note 18, at 88, my translation.47. See also Koschorke’s essay “Mastery and Slavery: A Masochist Falls Asleep Reading Hegel,” 116 MLN 551–63 (2001) [Google Scholar], in which he argues the same point via a reading of Venus in Furs together with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Koschorke argues that Sacher-Masoch’s seeming subversion of the master-slave dialectic actually falls short of Hegel’s own humanist insights, thus staging “a stagnant dialectic—an immobile perseverance in estrangement, simultaneously suffered and affirmed as a mythic fatality” (id. at 562–63). Koschorke’s argument here bears similarities to that of Kelly (who alludes to the same falling-asleep-reading scene), only that where the former reads this as an insufficiency vis-à-vis Hegel’s philosophy of the subject, the latter reads it as a devastating critique of same. See Kelly, supra note 45, at 28–29. My own view is that neither of these positions are tenable, insofar as Sacher-Masoch is ultimately uninterested—despite all seeming applicability—in the identity and recognition (or lack thereof) promised by the master-slave dialectic, and instead privileges precisely the erotic/political/juridical force of non-identity and non-recognition.48. See Hegel, supra note 38, at §72, 66.49. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel (New York: Modern Library, 1918), 49 [Google Scholar], translation slightly modified. Original, see Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Werke, Kritische Ausgabe 6.2, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari 314 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 259–431 [Google Scholar]. References are to the translation and the original, respectively.50. Id. at 49–50 (translation modified)/315–16. It should be noted that Samuel’s translation considerably diminishes the wordplay and sexual innuendo of Nietzsche’s vocabulary, e.g., in the above-noted Wollust (lust, concupiscence) and Vergewaltigung (violation, rape).51. In his own interpretation of these passages in Nietzsche, Derrida, playing on the words Glaube/ Gläubiger (belief/creditor) presents a counter-genealogy to Nietzsche’s own counter-genealogy of Christianity to discern faith (in the other) as original to the notion of debt, and grace as original to the notion of law (as opposed to it being a Pauline innovation). See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 113–15 [Google Scholar]; see also Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 262–73. [Google Scholar]52. See Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX (1923–1925), The Ego and the Id and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 155–70. [Google Scholar]53. Or as Freud himself bluntly puts it: “Kant’s Categorical Imperative is … the direct heir of the Oedipus complex” (id. at 166).54. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Capital, in Collected Works, trans. Samuel Moore & Edward Aveling, vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 95. [Google Scholar]55. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 89/150.56. See Deleuze, supra note 13, at 88–89.57. In Deleuzian language, the latter (which Deleuze himself overlooks in Sacher-Masoch) might be called Sacher-Masoch’s “clinical” moment. On the “critical” and “clinical” approaches to the law/ laws in Deleuze, see Laurent de Sutter, Deleuze: La pratique du droit (Paris: Michalon, 2009) [Google Scholar]. On Sacher-Masoch in particular, see 29–39.58. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1913–1926), eds. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 240. [Google Scholar]59. See Derrida, supra note 16, at 16.60. See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 89/150.61. Id. at 89/150–51.62. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 288. [Google Scholar]63. See, e.g., Peter Goodrich on the legal function of the image of the feminine (or the feminine image) as “the outside within, … an internalized exteriority, a desire within wisdom… . the emblem of another law or law of law, of the contingency and thus fracture of such doctrine, dogma, or jurisprudence that claims the singularity, unity, or closure of legal forms.” Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 38. [Google Scholar] See also Hegel, supra note 62, at 278, on the “upward” and “downward” movements of the law, corresponding to man and woman, respectively.64. See Marx & Engels, supra note 54, at 292.65. See Deleuze, supra note 13, at 102.66. Id. at 102.67. See Biale, supra note 44, at 320.68. Id. at 318.69. See Eugen Bleuler, “Die Ambivalenz,” in Beiträge zur Schizophrenielehre der Zürcher Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Burghölzi (1902–1971), ed. Manfred Bleuler (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 85–97. [Google Scholar] Bleuler specifically mentions masochism (along with sadism) on page 92, in a paragraph on the role of ambivalence in sexuality. See also Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 37–39. [Google Scholar]70. One hardly needs the help of psychoanalysis, however, to identify this mechanism in Sacher-Masoch’s work. See, e.g., his novella “Der Judenraphael,” in Geschichten aus Galizien (1882), ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Bölau, 1989), 39–157 [Google Scholar], in which the main character, the avowed anti-Semite Plutin, not only falls in love—this time reciprocated but doomed—with the beautiful Jewess Hadaßka, but also, as the title indicates, becomes a talented specialist in the portraiture of the Jews of his region. Still more explicit is the end of the short story “Lewana,” from the same collection as “Frau Leopard,” in which the rich widow Zamira confesses to the enslaved Jew Nahum Bukarest, “Do you know why I beat you? … Because I was angry with myself. I was ashamed of loving my slave and a man who wasn’t of my faith, to whom I could never give my hand” (see Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3,at 33/57). In his introductory essay, meanwhile, Sacher-Masoch goes so far as to attribute anti-Semitism as a whole to sheer unacknowledged admiration and envy (id. at 9/16–17). See also Harold Bloom’s association, in his Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999) [Google Scholar], between the workings of psychological ambivalence in The Merchant of Venice and forms of literary irony (id. at 190).71. Koscieloski’s crisis of ambivalence in fact presents him from the very beginning with the question of the loss of identity, in the form of the alternative of capitulation or suicide: “After he had struggled for a time, he told himself one day that he was mortally in love with this woman, the daughter of a hated race, and that there was nothing left but for him to shoot a bullet through his head, or to give himself up to the beautiful Satan.” See Sacher-Masoch, supra note 3, at 87/147–48.72. See Shakespeare, supra note 1, at I.iii.27–28.73. See, e.g., Jessica and Lorenzo’s vulgar punning on food in id. at III.v.12–50.74. Interesting in this context is Bleuler’s comment: “Between Saul and Paul is just as little psychological difference as between a person moved to tears and a cheerful optimist.” See Bleuler, supra note 69, at 89–90, my translation.75. Gilles Deleuze, “Re-Presentation of Sacher-Masoch,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54. [Google Scholar]76. See Lupton, supra note 8, at 96–97.77. Wendy O. Brown reads in contemporary minoritarian politics the workings of a masochist fantasy of thwarted desire for and shame in the face of the dominant order and the ensuing compulsion to reenact one’s own victimization precisely at the moment one thinks to claim one’s political rights. Although the “wish to restage rather than escape scenes of subjection and violation” that she sees as a prevalent and counterproductive feature of such politics might at first appear to be precisely what is occurring in Sacher-Masoch’s tale, it nevertheless makes a difference that the scenario is not that of an authority figure beating the powerless boy while the still more powerless girl looks on (as in Freud in Brown’s reading), but that of a minority woman beating the authority figure for the enjoyment of the author and his readership—and thus is not a mere traumatic repetition of the standard modes of subject formation but a decided provocation thereof. See Wendy O. Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46. [Google Scholar]78. See Shakespeare, supra note 1, at IV.i.389.79. Lupton notes that, despite contemporary readerly inclinations, something similar may also be the case in The Merchant of Venice: from the perspective of Shakespeare’s time, at least, according to which neither Judaism nor alien status could be considered exactly an advantage, Shylock’s legal loss is his political and spiritual gain. See Lupton, supra note 8, at 101.80. See Marx, supra note 7, at 26.81. Id. at 24–25.82. Geoffrey Hartmann, “The Tricksy Word: Richard Weisberg on The Merchant of Venice,” in 23/1 Law and Literature 71–79, 75 (2011). [Google Scholar]83. For an examination of Sacher-Masoch’s work in the context of late Habsburg Empire policies on the eastern Jews, see Chris Thornhill, “‘Grenzfälle’: Galician Jews and Austrian Enlightenment,” 49/2 German Life and Letters 171–81 (1996) [Google Scholar].84. Id. at 172. Thornhill continues: “Indeed, the enlightened position which reflects on national rights of different peoples is clearly not finally extricable from the position which simply reviles the different, in anti-Semitism” (id. at 172). According to Thornhill, Sacher-Masoch’s Jewish tales merely replicate this double bind of tolerance and contempt; although this may be true in part, Thornhill restricts his analysis to a few programmatic passages, ignoring the rhetorical and narrative aspects that necessarily problematize such an interpretation .85. See Shakespeare, supra note 1, at IV.i.402–3.86. Id. at I.iii.14.87. See The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997) [Google Scholar]: “You have heard that it has been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say to you, That you resist not evil: but whoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.