VenereFuoriTempo. Intorno a Venere in pelliccia di Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz is a seminal work of European literature for several reasons. The first: a few decades before Freud and less than a century before Lacan, von Sacher-Masoch’s novel devises a poetics of desire that appears disruptively contemporary. The second reason is related to the reconfiguration that von Sacher-Masoch operates on the literary tradition. The poetic imagery of Venus im Pelz grows out of the intersection of two traditions: on the one hand, the German tradition of the infernal and demonic Venus; while, on the other hand, von Sacher-Masoch looks to France (where Venus im Pelz was very successful) and to French Parnassian-symbolist literature, which stages the disturbing return of Venus in the desolate and dissonant industrial and technocratic modernity. The third reason is rather related to the problem of the dialogue between the forms of artistic expression and, in particular, the relationship between poetic word and image or, more broadly, between poetic word and visual arts. Finally, there is the mythical background that takes us back to the early modern European origins (and from them to the ancient tradition) of the “Venus in Furs” motif: it is the image of the dominant Aphrodite-Venus, of the martial Aphrodite-Venus, to whom the god of war surrenders his weapons, submitting to the yoke of love: it is the famous topos of the loves of Aphrodite-Venus and Ares-Mars that runs through the entire poetic and visual culture of the Western World. Essays by: Massimo Stella, Giovanni Bottiroli, Mena Mitrano, Francesca Monateri, Andrea Bellavita, Chiara Portesine.