Malek Alloula: The Colonial Harem (1981/1986)

“Malek Alloula takes the everyday object of postcard and shows how it was a classic locus of Orientalism, which has long been a phantasm of the West: ‘There is no phantasm, though, without sex and in this Orientalism .. a central figure emerges, the very embodiment of the obsession: the harem’. In Arabic, harim means forbidden and thus also refers to the women’s quarters of many Islamic households, which are forbidden to strange men. Embroidering from four centuries of stories concerning the Imperial harem in Istanbul, however, the Western imagination had transformed every harem into a hotbed of sensuality and sexuality. France colonized Algeria in 1830, an operation documented at the time by the artist Eugène Delacroix and later depicted by countless Orientalist artists, led by figures like Horace Vernet and Eugène Fromentin. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the fine art genre of the odalisque, or Oriental nude, was displaced by a flood of popular postcards depicting the algérienne, the Algerian woman.

Alloula, himself Algerian, studied this mass of now-discarded visual material in his classic study The Colonial [Harem] in which he wants to ‘return this immense postcard to its sender’, the French colonizer. He shows how the veiled Algerian woman was a provocation to the European photographer as her light clothing produced a ‘whiteout’ in the bright sun, a technical failure of the photograph to register strong differences of light and dark. The women’s peephole gaze from behind the veil recalls the photographer’s own gaze from behind the cloth of a tripod camera of the period and in a sense ‘the photographer feels photographed .. he is dispossessed of his own gaze‘. The response is to remove the obstacle to the gaze–to obliterate it, in Terry Smith’s terms–by raising the veil: ‘he will unveil the veil and give figural expression to the forbidden’. Thus from the seemingly innocent postcards showing a woman slightly lifting her veil to the popular image of a half-naked Algerian woman, there is hardly a step. The colonial gaze must see and make an exhibition of these women, which is then rendered as the aesthetic. The erotic effect, such as it is, is beside the point in this operation of colonial visualism.” (from Nicolas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader, 2002, pp 475-476)

Originally published as Le Harem Colonial: Images d’un sous-érotisme, Editions Slatkine, Geneve-Paris, 1981
Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
Introduction by Barbara Harlow
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1986
Theory and History of Literature series, Volume 21
ISBN 0719019079, 9780719019074
160 pages

review (Gregory K. Betts, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature)
review (Carlos Shloss, The New York Times)
review (Arlette Gautier, Les Cahiers du CEIMA, in French)
commentary (Jean-Noël Ferrié & Gilles Boëtsch, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord)

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Klaus Theweleit: Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (1977-78/1987)

These two volumes center upon the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, seeking out and reconstructing their images of women.

“Theweleit’s study of the fascist consciousness in general and the bodily experience of these former soldiers in particular, easily detected in their hatefilled, near-illiterate books, was well received. Theweleit used Wilhelm Reich, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for his basic theory, but also empirical research, especially of the leading German left-wing historian of Weimar unrest, his friend Erhard Lucas and he was always discussing his findings with his wife, who has professional clinical experience. Theweleit writes in an anti-academic, highly personal style.” (from Wikipedia)

Heavily illustrated with cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters of the era.

Volume 1: Women Floods Bodies History
Originally published as Männerphantasien, Bd 1: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte, Roter Stern, 1977
Translated by Stephen Conway, in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner
Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1987
ISBN 0816614482
517 pages

Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
Originally published as Männerphantasien, Bd 2: Männerkörper. Zur Psychoanalyse des Weißen Terrors, Roter Stern, 1978
Translated by Erica Carter and Chris Turner, in collaboration with Stephen Conway
Foreword by Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1987
ISBN 0816614504
507 pages

wikipedia (in German)
publisher (Vol. 2)
google books (Vol. 1)
google books (Vol. 2)

Volume 1 (15 MB, updated on 2014-12-7)
Volume 2 (37 MB, updated on 2014-12-7)

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts (2012)

“Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we’re abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.

Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual’s erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.

The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.

This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.”

Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745661521, 9780745661520
300 pages

review (David Wolpe, Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Jacqui Gabb, LSE Review of Books)

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