Prostitution: “Dialectics of the Whore”: A sensually non-sensual thing

In the figure of the prostitute, imagination and reality, projective longing and depressing reality intertwine to the point of indistinguishability. The saying that commercial love is the oldest trade in the world belies the specific nature of prostitution, its interweaving with the history of the capitalist commodity economy as well as with the history of the bourgeois family. In his 1912 essay “The Most General Degradation of Love Life,” Sigmund Freud formulated with unsurpassed clarity what liberal social theorists, as well as communists and socialists, were unable to see, even if they were critically concerned with the status of women in bourgeois society: the necessary, albeit hidden and denied connection between bourgeois and prostitute sexuality, “purchasable” and supposedly purposeless love. Even connected to the bourgeois form of thought, Freud formulated precisely from this connection what citizens and enemies of the citizens did not express: that the whore as well as the wife, the imago of the pure woman as well as that of the rejected woman, as alternating images that refer to one another, testify to the failure of society, which produced both.

Not simply political economy, but the sexuality of that economy is the place to go if you want to understand what people do to each other and why. The riddle that would have to be solved is encoded less in the commodity described by Marx as a “sensuous non-sensual thing” than in the whore and her relationship to the commodity. The history this Neither Marxism nor left-wing socialism, nor bourgeois historiography nor liberalism tells the story of political economy. Approaches to it can be found in authors who have little in common apart from this cognitive impulse: in Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the commodity as an allegory, in Georges Bataille’s anti-economics, in Alexandra Kollontai’s criticism of the “new morality of the working class”, in Paul Lafargue’s writings the courtesan, in Georg Simmel’s texts on fashion and coquetry and, last but not least, in Karl Kraus’ articles on “morality and crime” published between 1902 and 1907, in which he used court cases against prostitutes to defend them without using them for the betterment of bourgeois society stylize.

Such consistent ambivalence is the impulse of Theodora Becker’s study “Dialectics of the Whore.” The subtitle – “From ‘Prostitution’ to ‘Sex Work'” – may suggest that it is an intervention in current debates about prostitution as female empowerment. However, the impression is deceptive. In fact, Becker’s book is the first – in substance and not just in rhetoric – historical-materialist reconstruction of the genesis of prostitution from the inherently aporetic constitution of civil society. Becker makes it clear at the beginning that she is not interested in resolving the contradiction, but rather in elaborating it, by describing the whore as a social character who does not simply express the contradiction of the commodity form in the sphere of sexuality, but rather in the relationship between whore and commodity doubled: “With regard to the status of the prostitute, the question of the nature of her commodity results in the crucial difference as to whether she is the object or subject in this trade, the commodity itself or just its seller – or how she can be both at the same time . With regard to the customer, it is also not clear what his relationship to the purchased goods consists of: Does he behave as an (active) consumer or as a (passive) service recipient or is he himself a (co-)producer of the purchased goods?” An ambivalence , which, as Becker emphasizes, “fundamentally cannot be resolved unilaterally.”

The fact that the insistence on the insolvability of the contradiction is the condition for its development is a leitmotif of Becker’s book. In six chapters she develops this idea by presenting the same question in sharply changing social-historical, political and ideological constellations in the form of the Echternach jumping procession, cited by Theodor W. Adorno in reference to Hegel as a symbol of dialectics. In the first chapter, based on the discussions about the so-called bourgeois improvement of prostitutes, especially in reading the 1890 book “Prostitution and Abolitionism” by the venereologist Benjamin Tarnowsky, she describes how progressive and reactionary, educational and medical defamations and defenses of prostitutes in the second half of the 19th century are similar in that they see prostitution as a crime – “either as a crime of prostitutes in society or as a crime of society to the prostitutes”. Pedagogy, moralization and medicalization follow the paradigm of delinquency, whether they want to protect prostitutes from their environment or vice versa.

The second chapter changes the perspective on the experience of prostitution without pitting this perspective against the discourse on prostitution. Rather, Becker uses literary and philosophical texts from the turn of the century (by Frank Wedekind, Otto Weininger, Karl Kraus) to illustrate that the experience of prostitution as an exchange relationship conveys something incommensurable to exchange, as a physical expression of the incomplete absorption of natural relations into social relations is. In the literalizations and aesthetic reflections – a rarely formulated, important idea in the book – the male subject is reflected not as a ruler and potentate, but as a weakened one: compared to female sexuality, male sexuality appears as “downright ridiculous and not worth mentioning: you is ‘poor’, a simple ‘function’, the man only needs an ‘apparatus’ to satisfy it. … It no longer contains any promise that transcends the subject. However, this insight into the depotentiation of the male social character by bourgeois society implies an imaginary and also real misunderstanding of the status of prostitutes, which, as an empirical one, cannot do justice to the fantasies attached to them.

The author then shows how both the bourgeois approach to such fantasies and the “new morality of the communists” have come into increasingly sharp contradiction to the reality of prostitution. She describes the “bourgeois regime of prostitution regulation” that no longer treats prostitution as a crime but as a “necessary evil,” as an attempt to exorcize the fantasies about prostitution on the body of the prostitute, which, the wilder the imagination over them, the less so come into view as subjects. In addition, Becker demonstrates how, since the turn of the century, the socialist and communist condemnation of prostitution as a “bourgeois institution” has produced a pseudo-solidarity with prostitutes, who are addressed as subjects of their arbitrary sexual-ethical self-control. Compared to the bourgeois fantasies of prostitution, this means a disillusionment that repeats the degradation of the prostitute in a different way: “Either it (lust as a profession) satisfies elementary needs that would otherwise remain unsatisfied, or it is a productive force in the production of erotic wealth… Prostitution would then not necessarily be socially necessary work, but would be part of surplus and luxury production. As such, however, the aporetic, incommensurable element that would have to be understood in order to understand why prostitution exists and why it doesn’t have to exist is once again erased from it.

Finally, Becker shows how the historically developed aporias are reproduced under changing conditions in the debates about the work nature of prostitution and the concept of “sexual service”. The strength of this is that she takes each of the positions she reconstructs – especially delusional ones like Otto Weininger’s – seriously, without ever fully identifying with any of them, and that she only ever takes sides in order to immediately counter the taking of sides with the truth that contradicts it book composed strictly with its subject in mind. He will not establish a special research area or a discourse controversy, and he will make enemies who are also enemies among themselves. But you should read it, treasure it and reread it.

Theodora Becker: Dialectics of the Whore. From ‘prostitution’ to ‘sex work’. Matthes & Seitz, 592 p., hardcover, €34.