Paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics masophobia, sexual difference, and E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Kater Murr

My dissertation explores the critical role of pleasure in aesthetics. While many aesthetic theories address the production of pleasure, I argue that they compromise their critical potential by assuming knowledge of the nature and hierarchy of different pleasures. German Classicism, for instance, links aesthetic pleasure to ideals of perfection, unity, and autonomy, whereas postmodern theories privilege diametrically opposed pleasures, delighting in destabilized, fluid identities. Within the model of aesthetics that I am proposing, these and other aesthetic possibilities share a common ground of paradoxical, undifferentiated sensations of pleasure and pain, which they organize in different ways into viable economies of pleasure. In this view, aesthetics involves both the partial sublimation and partial repression of paradoxical pleasures that I situate in the Lacanian register of the real and therefore call 'real masochism.' My model provides the basis for a double reading strategy aimed at exposing inadvertent tendencies of totalization: it allows for a distinction between different types of aesthetics in terms of their specific form of sublimation and makes the production of normative hierarchies---and of the structure of sexual difference as formulated by Lacan---intelligible as an effect of what I call 'masophobia,' that is, the (partial) repression of masochistic pleasures.;The first part of my dissertation motivates, develops, and exemplifies my model of aesthetics by negotiating between Lyotard and Bersani's claims for the anti-totalizing effect of paradoxical pleasures, between contrary positions on masochism and S/M within feminist and queer studies, and between Butler's and Zizek's positions on the real and sexual difference. Furthermore, it extracts my notion of real masochism from Laplanche's model of propping and seduction and reads Deleuze's aesthetic distinction between sadism and masochism as an exemplary re-interpretation of sexual difference as aesthetic difference. The second part presents a case study of Hoffmann's Kater Murr and its reception, develops further the notion of 'masophobia,' and shows how this late romantic novel points to the paradoxical ground of aesthetics and Bildung through parody, humor, and the non-hierarchical juxtaposition of different aesthetic possibilities.