Il rebus del godimento perduto. L'enigma oggettuale in Venus im Pelz

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs is not the narration of a story, but rather a rebus, a combination of images and fragments of language whose meaning lies in its being an open question addressed to the reader: what does the novel's protagonist seek on the stage of masochistic desire? Plato was the first to establish, through philosophical discourse, in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, the dyad ‘desire-pain’ as the emblem of love experience. Starting with the Platonic myths of the winged chariot (Phaedrus) and the spherical creatures of primeval times (Symposium), this essay is a re-reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, through the lens of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to which the author alludes throughout his novel. The purpose of this re-reading is to enucleate the verbo-visual features through which Leopold von Sacher-Masoch assembles his puzzle game.