Largier displays the form and function of the whip through long textual citations and detailed commentary, but then links these stagings with the corresponding spiritual, pornographic, medical discourses that lend them their specific cultural resonance.
Something for everyone, then. Especially if you're Catholic:
Arousal is perhaps the most prominent and most ambiguous component of self-flagellation, and it is this ambiguity that allows the whip to be conscripted by both the hermetic desert Christian and the modern libertine, presumably for antithetical purposes. Largier challenges and complicates this presumption by exploring the intersection of the religious and the erotic...
So f'rinstance,
[After Bolleau, at the turn of the C18th] The desire behind self-flagellation comes to be seen as libidinous and the eroticism of the whip driven by sadomasochistic images and affects. This explains the rise of an anti-clerical polemical literature which appears in the fifteenth century and continues into the twentieth.
I did wonder. In the end,
The libertine has exposed the voluptuous side of the ascetic's whip and cultivates this for its own sake, while the priest has now become the potentially perverse voyeur--at least, that's how he is imagined.
And there you have it. Don't say I never do anything for you kids.
Update: It's really not obvious that the title of this post is a link to the Amazon page, is it? Well it is. And here it is again:
Amazon.co.uk
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