Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

Largier argues that the act of whipping, both for the flagellant and possible voyeur, represents the unspeakable.  His study of the last thousand years of European literature pertaining to the whip, however, suggests that the act of whipping has actually been invested with a great deal of speech and meaning.  Largier's research suggests, in fact, that the whip articulates quite clearly for people the important issues of their day: from the self-flagellants in the monasteries of the 10th-century mimicking the Passion of Christ; to the 18th-century medical textbooks that saw ‘the discipline’ as a cure for all maladies of the mind and imbalances of the humours; to the libertine’s pornographic works that used whipping as a metaphor for free expression and disruption of hierarchies.  In Praise of the Whip is densely populated with large excerpts from the diaries of monks and nuns, religious sermons and debates, medical texts, and pornographic literature.  Flagellation has been, in different centuries, a means to experience divinity, health, or pleasure, and has paradoxically been seen as both a transcendence of the body, as well as a revelling in the flesh.

During the 10th-century, whipping was an act that was said to attack the body, the home of the devil, and thus drive out Lucifer (to the delight of heaven and the angels).  As part of the daily ritual of monks and nuns, whipping was considered akin to prayer, another way of communicating with, and becoming closer to God.  During the 13th-century, self-flagellation was praised as a spiritual sacrifice, a penance, and a mortification for the flesh that was a theatre for God.  The act was often done naked, and overcoming the shame of nudity was perceived as a way to return to the sinless state of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Whipping was done both in private and in public by numerous monastic orders with psalms often being recited during the act.  Special prayers and speeches were also read prior to whipping ceremonies that acted as a ritual remembrance of the Crucifixion. By re-creating the suffering of Christ, the flagellants believed that Mary would intercede on their behalf and beseech God to pardon their sins and deliver them from purgatory.  Self-flagellation was, in a sense, the best way to fast track one’s admittance to heaven.

Over the next four hundred years, whipping became hotly debated within the church.  Public processions of self-flagellators travelled Europe for periods of 33-days, in imitation of the 33-years of Christ’s life, enacting a drama of salvation amid a fervent belief in the coming Apocalypse.  Perhaps foreshadowing the whip’s future entrance into medical discourse, these public processions were believed to act as a protection from the plague.  However, a dramatic shift occurred in the church’s position on whipping between the 11th and 13th-centuries, with the publication of a number of critiques of the practice.

Today in Italy, flagellation processions still occur, but this is the exception, since during the late Middle Ages, self-flagellation became banned in most parts of Europe.  By the 15th-century, the Spanish Inquisition had declared self-flagellation to be a heresy and began executing the practitioners.  Whipping was now considered heretical because of its comparison with baptism.  The Inquisition found this view unacceptable and also interpreted the act of imitating Christ to be idolatrous and pagan.

Earlier 10th-century liturgical arguments that the act was a way to punish and detach from the body were no longer accepted and flagellation became associated with a focus on the flesh rather than a focus on the spiritual.  The moment of the whip’s contact with the flesh became a moment that no longer assured spiritual transcendence, but was now read as a pagan, erotic, and pornographic act, which led not to divine ecstasy but to hysteria and anti-social libertine tendencies.  Instead of an act of religious devotion, by 1700 whipping became associated with “the danger of libidinous arousal” (221).

Pornographic literature from 1700 onward was inspired by a number of scandals involving priests whipping young maidens after the virgins had confessed all of their ‘impure’ thoughts and fantasies.  The act of confession, much like the act of whipping, became in this period “a stage where what is otherwise kept silent is now freely spoken” (267).  Whipping became known as ‘the discipline’ and was enacted by numerous priests of the “gynopygian [i.e., ass-venerating] sect” (248; original brackets).  The particularly infamous case of Father Girard and Catherine Cadiere (the source material for the pornographic work Therese philosophe) was the epitome of the popular image of the cleric as a satyr-like seducer of nymphs who “stands in subversive opposition to the bourgeois household and its libidinal economy” (251).

Isolation and imagination became the necessary setting for the practice of whipping.  Nuns were attractive subjects for pornographers in their fantasies of nun’s nymphomania and obsession with self-flagellation, which instead of quenching the nun’s libido only enflamed it all the more into a “sensual delirium” (263). The obsession of the celibate religious orders with whipping began to be explained in terms of their repressed sexual desires, and this re-interpretation provided a bridge from the earlier belief in whipping as an act of  “penance, with the confession of forbidden desire and the purification of it” (261).  Confession, and the penance of whipping, according to Largier, act as the expression of imagination and fantasy both for the voyeur and the one being disciplined.

The unleashing of taboos in whipping’s juxtaposition of flesh and the divine, punishment and reward, fantasy and reality, began to be seen in the Enlightenment as a risk to sanity because:

… Every excess of erotic passion further destroys the ability of reason to control the passions … with this model the leader of the Enlightenment sought to draw us away from the “unhealthy” sexual morality of the church, which for them meant a sexual morality corrupted by the dominance of fantasy … they postulated a new and ideal moderation between nature and reason.  (303)

Critics of whipping said that flagellation transgressed “the limits that nature and reason set for the enlightened spirit” (314).  In contrast, the libertines embraced the whip and saw it as the embodiment of “the unity of physical and psychical arousal … [which can make visible] the convertibility of word and image, narration and example, spirit and flesh” (315).  The act of flagellation became central to socially critical pornographic literature such as the work of Sade in which “the order of the world based on hierarchical differentiated and regulated exchange was abandoned in favour of a free-spirited libertinage, with property and marriage replaced by a free circulation of goods” (322).  Largier insists we should see “clerics, monks, and nuns … as the inventors of the thoroughly eroticised soul and of the underground libertine lifestyle” (323) and it is their influence which is responsible for such subversive works, which were largely condemned by the society of the time.

While all over Europe titillating flagellation literature flourished, England’s notorious upper class whipping brothels and pornographic literature gave it the reputation as the “homeland of flagellant tendencies” (334).  Largier states that the most famous English flagellant in history and literature was:

… The writer Algernon Charles Swinburne … [who celebrated] the voyeuristic moment, the specific emphasis on suffering, and the glorification of the most dreadfully imperious of beautiful women … [such as] the sinful heroine, the dreadful and avaricious dominatrix, the suffering female martyr, the condemned beauty, and the courtesan. (351)

In keeping with the medical theories of the day, which saw a love of whipping occurring at the developmental stage, thus being learned in childhood, Swinburne wrote much about his fond memories of being whipped at school at Eton.  In his work, he often cites “the pleasure of swimming in the river … is often linked with the experience of blows on the back as an image of rapture of the senses” (353).  Swinburne “accuses Sade’s work of being insufficiently radical and paradoxically (but insightfully) of being too close to Christian asceticism” (355).  Rather than linking whipping with the incomprehensibility of God, Swinburne saw it as a way to reach understanding of the self and the universe though creativity.  He saw  “a close connection between poetic creativity and the desire for the rod … pain and physical desire were not some extrinsic aspect of writing, but elementary moments of writing, no less than of the erotic sphere” (357).  In James Joyce as well, Largier notes an association with whipping and writing whereby “the relationship between writing and blows is central … the sound, the “high whistling sound” of the rod, … [is] associated not only with pain, but also with the “the slow scarping of the pens”.”(358).

While the brothels and fans of flagellation tended to keep their activities private the “custom of English educators of whipping their pupils extensively” (363) was widely known throughout Europe.  To this day, Largier notes, brothels still call whipping services “English educational methods”.  Although the whipping of schoolboys was part punishment, part penance, and part medical therapy, it still created “problem of arousal stemming from the theatricality of the event” (364).

During the 18th-century, the whip was widely agreed by medical practitioners to have numerous therapeutic uses – it could balance the ‘humours’, it could act on the kidneys to increase blood flow, it would encourage fertility in both men and women, it could make semen flow and eggs drop, and even cool you down or warm you up.  Whipping was also suggested as the best cure for marital problems because a wife knew you really cared if you gave her a few lashes every now and then, and it also apparently would get her in the mood. Whipping was “transgressive only when it fails to serve a legitimate purpose …[it was] a practice with medical and therapeutic justification that under certain circumstances can be useful to anyone when the powers of procreation and lust are weakened” (400).  Flagellation became the most popular new remedy and was recommended for everything from melancholy, mania, paralysis, epilepsy, stupidity, hardness of hearing, toothache, dislocation of the jaw, and muteness, all of which doctors saw as “diseases of the head which can be cured with blows” (420).

Today, flagellation is less seen as a cure for illness but a more of a symptom of one.  Whipping is now designated as a taboo form of sexuality in contrast to normative heterosexual marriage.  Largier laments the way that sexuality, now seen in terms of human psychology,  “reduces the complexity of the flagellation rituals, subordinating them entirely to the functional context … [thus whipping] loses its possible spiritual significance … [and] loses the erotic-libertine dimension of liberated arousal” (440).  He sees flagellation in the modern age as an “idiosyncrasy” rather than a ritual of transcendence.  The whip, Largier concludes, has lost much of its significance and potential for inciting the imagination by now only being seen in terms of human sexuality.  Seeing the act of flagellation purely only in terms of sexual arousal acts to “eliminate the conspiratorial connection between imagination, affect, and libido that is always found in confessional praxis, religious rituals, and erotic flagellation” (446).

While Largier argues that whipping speaks the unspeakable and says the unutterable, his work suggests an immense and important multiplicity of meaning across European culture.  The whip acts as a mediator of new ideas and of radical theories and it seems to be both an instrument and an act that is immensely flexible and able to shift cultural significance and iconic status in different contexts.  This flexibility of the whip is perhaps why Largier feels that, in a current age of multiple truths, the unstable meaning of the whip has been disciplined into exclusively being read in an erotic context.  In an age of slippery truths, Largier believes that the way the whip conveys, “ambiguity became unbearable … as a consequence, the only place the imagination is now allowed to occupy is the arts” (446).  While subversive sexualities such as B&D (Bondage and Discipline) and S&M (Sadism & Maschochism) are now more publicly acknowledged and accessible than previously, their legitimacy has often been mediated through the arts.  However, I do disagree with Largier’s argument that the whip is no longer at the crux of articulating taboos.  In contemporary feminism, the sexual cultures of B&D and S&M frequently act as a fascinating mediator for debates about abuse, sexual power, feminism and many other developing and controversial arguments regarding gender and social structures. A good whipping may no longer be guaranteed to get you into heaven, or to cure your headache, but it remains a theatrical and creative act that awakens and heightens the senses through a unique mix of pleasure and pain.

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal
(2007)

by Niklaus Largier (translated by Graham Harman)
Publisher: Zone Books New York 2007
ISBN-10: 1-890951-65-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-890951-65-8
6 x 9, 550 pp., 52 b&w illus.
$37.00/£22.95 (CLOTH)