In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

378 CODES COLLAPSED
If it's just one more night, I'd like to stay.
But make good use of your time. The bad thing is
That you're standing here on the threshold.
Let's talk faster,
For we almost forgot that you're mortal.
And desire silenced my voice.
(Brecht, 160f£.)
Perhaps the force of this poem-as well as that of bullfighting scenes by
Hemingway, Montherlant, and Kracauer [see Bullfighting]-stems from
the fact that the authors make no attempt to explain the connection
between Death and sexual fulfillment. They merely describe, sometimes
in meticulous detail, how the perception of Death's closeness triggers
sexual desire. On the other hand, efforts to understand this phenomenon
yield results that range from the unconvincing to the truly embarrassing.
Theodor Lessing's claim that a general law links Death to erotic pleasure,
for example, is hardly substantiated by the fact that bees die after losing
their stinger-for the stinger does not have any reproductive (or "sexual")
function: "Nature appears cruel to human eyes only because it
binds together death and sexuality ... Of ten thousand [male bees], only
one is admitted into the heaven of love, and this happens only when he
loses his stinger. At that moment, he experiences the well-known interconnectedness
of love and death" (Lessing, "Biene und Wespe," 252,
255). Without any further explanation, D. H. Lawrence has the central
female character in his novel The Plumed Serpent attribute the "finality
of death" to a marriage that is based on the unchallenged sexual domination
of the male partner: "Ah! and what a mystery of prone submission,
on her part, this huge erection would imply! Submission absolute,
like the earth under the sky. Beneath an over-arching absolute. Ah! what
a marriage! How terrible! and how complete! With the finality of death,
and yet more than death" (332-333). [see Male vs. Female] Walter
Benjamin offers a particularly allusive thesis regarding the link between
sexual gratification and Death: "Sexual fulfillment frees man from his
secret, which consists not in sexuality but in its fulfillment-and which
can perhaps be severed from him (never solved) only in this fulfillment.
It can be compared to the fetters that keep him attached to life. The
woman cuts through them, and the man becomes free to die, because he