The Inverted ‘Rue d’Amour’ : On Hans Peter Duerr’s Der erotische Leib, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1997

Abstract

Der erotische Leib, Hans Peter Duerr’s latest book and the fourth instalment of his Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess (The Myth of the Civilising Process), deals with differences and similarities through time and place in the erotic appeal of breasts and in the standard of shame that surrounds them. It is an interesting topic and an amusing book, like the other volumes generously illustrated, even in the notes, with sexual and erotic pictures. As might be expected, there is a striking similarity between the ‘breasts pictures’ on the one hand, and Duerr’s writing on what could be called ‘breast cultures’, on the other hand: both the ‘breast pictures’ of women in all kinds of situations and from all kinds of times and places and the text on all kinds of ‘breast cultures’ are characterised by their large variety. Although the topic is titillating enough and Duerr has an entertaining style of writing, the description of ‘breast cultures’ is almost as flat as the ‘breast pictures’, that is, after a while they become rather boring, despite all variation, because Duerr’s theoretical framework is quite thin. In his description of the appearance on the scene of see-through blouses and monokinis (with pictures), for example, the question why this development – in the direction of greater shamelessness? – has occurred, is not seriously raised. Only in his concluding section did Duerr succeed in arousing some intellectual excitement in me. Whereas his description of a variety of breast cultures is rather poor from a theoretical perspective, this tiny concluding chapter finally reveals Duerr’s theoretical affinities