larry wolff, paolina's innocence: casanova's girls — ideas
"when franceschini first presented himself to the bestemmia as a fond, paternal employer, he must have supposed that no one but himself and the child could know what really occurred behind the bedroom door."
what occured behind the bedroom door is about knowing what happened through an experience, an aesthetic moment. whatever happened behind a bedroom door is already a subject of politics because the entire world isn't involved in what happens behind it. the only time something happening behind a bedroom door makes sense is if a bunch of other people doing the same thing would protect you from doing it. technically speaking, the "vanilla" enviornment behind a bedroom door is the only socially designated safe spot for various acts, including pedophilia, yet, this same social designation already makes it a compromise, one that allows the public to then assume what happens behind it the moment you present yourself.
naturally, if you never owned a bedroom, or a door, or windows, and then if anyone could peak inside of it, this wouldn't stop them from questioning what happened in the bedroom even if they could see into it at all times. this may be because the very room logic itself is, equivalent to dentistry, an operation of domesticity. the bedroom door resists containing a contaminated child in it, the concept of affair becomes both this thing that occured and stained the child but also this thing that was already operationalized or processed as a possible action only within the confines of that enviornment.
yet, at the same time, the public jurisdiction that begins to be concerned with what happens behind a bedroom door is no longer about what happened but about what they can derive about what happened, which even the public itself doesnt believe this to be the same thing. naturally, even you yourself in this position would not know "what" occured in the room, or at least it would seem hardly as important from a civil standpoint than from an aesthetic point. surely you would remember some aspects of "what" occured, but those would not sound moral or legal. this entire translation layer, like an augment, parasities on top of the layer of human enjoyment, divides and desacrilizes corporeal connectivity.
"he may have been surprised to discover from the questions that followed how sweepingly the tribunal had investigated the pockets and corners of his private life. in particular, the interrogation sought to establish a pattern of conduct in franceschini’s relations with young girls. the trial of franceschini stood at the threshold of modernity precisely because he recognized a norm of conduct for adult relations with little girls—“as one does with children”—which implied, by contrast, some recognition of abnormal, immoral, and even criminal conduct with children."
yet of course, this connectivity itself is not neutral. in many ways, those same subjects that appear in it are already in a social-structure vacuum from their natural standpoint. young girls being given away is a civil and ethical question, yet, the location of these girls itself already on the social level can be considered not a problem of "what", but of "how". the libertines in this society at this point already could most certainly acquire them, and this ability itself succeeds a lineage of possibility that underscores not sexual freedom but existing civil arrangement. the possibility then for a young girl to simply be in a room is not a question of paternal employment so far as the young girl herself is concerned, nor ultimately of the actions that transpire behind close doors. instead, the question that becomes assumed, that of immorality, abnormality, or conduct, is a problem that the public itself fully cultivates and stands by.
if the public were instead to assume that the worst symbolic act in the world is to drink soup from a spoon, then franceschini would be undoubtedly questioned about the existence and intentional allocation of spoons in his cupboard. the jury may ask him, why are spoons located in an area that collects and exhibits dining utensils? why are they not located maybe, near the altar or prayer room? what could they be doing, placed there? what could they be doing in your bed? all of these questions pertain to a civil understanding of aesthetic possibility. natural connection, erotic excitement, itself, has territories, limits, possible deliniation lines.
"it has been argued—in the introduction to foucault’s history of sexuality, for instance—that the very notion of a sexual identity, a character defined by a man or woman’s sexual nature, became a fundamental aspect of modern life only in the nineteenth century, along with the modern concepts of sexual normality, and correspondingly, sexual perversion."
the young girl in his bed surely finds herself in it less as a "state" of being in it, but more as another question, albeit not necessarily a civil question. the entire existence of "transpiring" happens to exist in the enviornment where a young girl could ever find herself in that enviornment. everything else, the entire possibility of pedophilia, itself is predicated on a system that locates it. not on a system that discovers sexuality by transposing it against the image of a child, or invents sexual categories it later posits images of taboo on, but rather, the existence of a child itself becomes questioned only under a metric where this questioning itself is possible. there is no naturally integrated anti-pedophilic order, the child does not have spikes imbedded in her skin that unleash if they detect the touch of anybody above fourteen years old or her own mother.
franceschini himself does not need to "recognize" the complexities of a philosophical issue presented to him. all he has to do is realize the intensity of a moral claim by inferring the perceived affect of the questioner, then position himself accordingly. franceschini may have known that venice had some laws in place, albeit liberal, to at the very least question some aspects of his activity. yet, the place he finds himself in is one that already permits these questions as a social possibility. children themselves, in all their "naivety" find themselves as maidens who bring older men coffee, who exist as perceivable subjects in these places. this is no accident, for an ultimate crime itself carries its own connotation. in the contemporary era, the very existence around a child that is not by direct family lines, by a direct event of reciprocation, carries the immediate suspicion of a kidnapping. the question of paternal possibility is underscored by the idea of carrying an existing ethical burden, an existing responsibility.
"franceschini himself seemed to recognize that questions about children, however superficially innocuous, needed to be answered with the utmost care. his denials, evasions, and notable lapses of memory (“i do not recall anything; i don’t remember”) suggested that he was alert to the advent of modern cultural anxiety concerning sex and children."
this recognition stems not from an inability of course to remember such events, but from a recognition that the correct epistemology was not already present in his own ability to discern his sexual interests. for, if he had carried the same resoluteness about his own sexual endeavours with the judges and jury, he would never find himself pursuing this instance, or would have done it in a completely different way ("enjoying to look at them dine" – itself an unmistakable perversion in todays world, or by any means, any form of expressed free affect around the image of children). since there is no way to reconcile his vision with that of the court, franceschini opts for pure ignorance, knowing it muddies his account and makes his own testimony less reliable (as shown later) precisely because any graphic description would indict his character, stain his reputation, expand on his possibility.
yet, the liberation of an aesthetic confession itself is what if not the ability to pronounce your own freedoms? these freedoms are themselves partial social augments, they are incomplete, always changing, partially boundaried, or seperate from the world of impulse or vestibularity. the ability to process everything around yourself does not exist in the exact same dimension as skin, which carries a far different mark, one of sensation, proximity, longing, perceivability, exposure. yet vestibularity is seperate, say that his eyes were frickling a little bit, or they were puffy or tense, or his skin had a goosebumps sensation, or his head was twitching rapidly, and he was there, staring at the girl. the victorian disposition of young women does not itself carry processuality, but only a latent sense of belonging to an enviornment. as franceschini himself notes, his treatment of her existence is more like a furniture, or an arrangement, or part of a collective, and her disposition is more bodily, her existence more of an assumption. franceschini, in bed with a young girl, has to evaporate his own mind, not to protect himself, not to protect his own self-image, but to equate himself with the desires of the masses, to attain an assumption that sits at the similar degree at the whims of the masses. what he sees with his eyes is now seperate from what he sees with his lawful mind, what is seen in that moment of exposure to the young girl.
“i began to live truly independently of everything that could place limits on my inclinations,” wrote casanova, recalling his younger years in venice. “as long as i respected the laws, it seemed to me that i could despise prejudices [mépriser les préjugés]. i thought i could live perfectly free [parfaitement libre] in a country subject to an aristocratic government ... casanova recalled, though he would have to learn the political lesson that “true liberty does not exist and cannot exist anywhere,” not even in venice. franceschini would learn the same lesson. true liberty, however, remained the libertine ideal, a political and romantic fantasy, even if it could not exist in mundane reality."
in this same way, this ideal of true liberty sits enclosed in a libertine assumption. this assumption is one where innocence is equated with a freestanding nature to deny any asserted laws as supposedly naturalistic in their conception. so in that way, the erotic innocence itself is not an innocence of character, or a freedom of action, but an appeal to an architectural conception of women as maidservants whose entire existence revolves around the idea of the freedom of their bodily movement in so far as they are perceived as objects of domesticity that are not yet domesticated into love or a freestanding position. so in retrospect, their character is that of love or joy to be extracted, but yet, this extraction is a container of a soul, of a connection with the other that is seen as truly isolated from the enviornment.
in contemporary consent laws, the aspect of power asymmetry exists only when considering power outside of sex. say as a philosophical speculative example an adult and a child entered an economic-suspending vacuum in space where they could commit the act and could consider it, so far as this metaphysical system prevented them from enacting it in a non vacuumed space. the resource imbalance and social intruige and difference in knowledge would assumably not interact with their real world positions or understandings. so power asymmetry seems more to be about the increase of this asymmetry historically.
except, now consider again the young-girl-as-furniture. this furniturization, this collective image, already is an isolated vacuum (economic-suspending) when it comes to the economy of sovereignity. on one hand, the economy of civil life assumes a specific arrangement that isnt related to the economy of sovereignity. this secondary economy then wagers upon the first, and slowly corrupts the possibility of civil engagement. if suddenly, however, a million pedophiles started enacting their arrangements, the social layer would give in way before sovereignty would be able to catch up.
and more specifically, the market that delegates the rules for authorization didnt have clear laws in place, but even worse than having specific laws, the social expectations and policies surrounding these cases are more about hear-say, are more about the base rate of expected reality surrounding affairs and procedures related to the fact. of course, a judicial examination of social reality is in fact a way to figure out whether someones civil life was authorized, yet at the same time, the later trauma discourse contemporary law would build its proceedings off of, itself, partially discriminates against the validity of its own rhetoric. this detachment later makes its authorization ritual all the more detached from its real life circumstantiality or the proceedings it itself recognizes as valid. so then, the ability to live freely and independently and follow your impulses is itself the ability to behave freely towards a particular set of circumstances. try to imagine a libertine that conceives of liberty as the ability to drive a motorcycle without a helmet or on concrete roads, in a society that is slowly closing off the concept of streets themselves.
in this way, it is sovereignity that makes the first call, and simultaneously its own authorization that ceases first. yet, the conditions it itself probes on could be fully virutalized in comparison to its metrics. say for example there was a rule banning going sideways with your horse, and a proceeding took place with an accusation in a horse race that has tracks that require horses to go sidewways. the movement of the horse is not in question, but rather, the social violation as constituted by expectations, expectations which later remove the social possibility of women acting as furnitures and not free agents. yet, this removal happens because others dont want to be implicated in the moral question behind it, more than it happens because any particular agent actually had a positive theory of predation or power asymmetry.
in this instance, the liberty in question is not infinite freedom, but the relative position between the ability to cycle in a road, and the question of that road's very existence, or rather, the relative juxtaposition between social compromise and the fabrication of desire, or even more specifically, between the economy of sovereignty and the economy of civil life, which bases itself almost entirely on exceptions to possibilities rather than on expectations of possibility. in any supposedly free agent, the first question that comes to mind is not the veneration, or metaphysics-level-rape, of any agent, or the fundamental rupture of all expected reality, but rather, those tiny instances that allow for a re-consideration of social ill within a confined space.
the idea behind the horse analogy and the economy of soveregnity's relation to the supposed de-economized vacuum is that developmental decision making itself seems to be more related to pre supposed power asymmetries that hardly relate to the act itself. rather it seems that patching up the ability to commit the act prevents further abuses which are already systematically in place, given the consequences of such abuses could hardly exist if the territory was already uneven to begin with. the irony behind locking the idea of comprehension into a jurispridential absolute is that epistemology itself, if its socially hierarchical and scalar, then actually corresponds to different "value sets", in a sense the adult is punishing the childs volition due to their colition not being able to comprehend the act itself at an "expected" level. comprehension itself is then paternalized instead of relativized, and the act is punished above the idea of an "informancy" of possible actions, where the entire consideration or sense of the act is placed behind the idea of being able to uncover what it is.
the anti-economic vacuum is not supposed to point only towards the false conceptualization behind assumptions about the conditions of innocence that insitutitions and civil life have closed into the child, and towards the idea that a dissolution of application suddenly removes the natural hinge that otherwise would exteriorize this assumption, but that also, civil life itself begins to constitute children through a counter-vacuum that simultaneously lowers their agency, prevents predation and exterior contact, and shoves them into a simulation that slowly creates the very asymmetries that become self-relevatory about the child. remove the child from one economic requirement and into the next, and the social layer would create totally different dependencies and relations. yet, even these would be informed by a latent projection that produces through the child territories that are really cultural arguments about other, unrelated things, such as power and status and their consideration more generally.
this is why the anti-economic vacuum, outside of the economy of wagers, would de-economize the childs body, because likewise, not only would civil conditions be stripped, but the ability to wager around them as a layer of social mediation would cease. in many ways, non-pedophilic desire would entirely fail, and only truly pedophilic (not sexually or erotically - but concept-interested instead of self-interested) pleasure would remain. yet in this instance, the need to even conceive of pedophilia itself would not remain, having revealed itself as a power discourse rather than a genuine conception of the nature of an alternate human. it is not that the juxtaposition between an adult and a child's body is that which creates the seperation, but much like racialism, the arbitrariness of the seperation is itself the product of a grammatization which encodes the body with values, only later to be processed by civil discourses, but in many ways, only produced by these same discourses.
a truly ontological racism also exists somewhere suspended in this discourse, but one that, outside of its pure moral and political reality, could not possibly be defended nor argued through any modern lense. the anti economic vaccuum doesnt reveal the historical acceleration of asymmetry itself, but it does reveal its absence if you assume a blank slate, or otherwise the arbitrariness of its existence if you assume subjects with memory of the non vacuumed frame. cruically, it doesnt matter which assumption holds, since the ontology of an anti-economic vaccuum would quickly reveal - rather than desacrate or remove - the dependencies that civil life requires in order to constitute subjects in the way that it does
so then, moving onto this frame and into a new concept, the counter-vacuum image (innocence as vaccum or more specifically, the institution as the only valid pervert over the child – the only command able to cultivate a non-suspicious erotic capture of the agency of the child and its body) is projected by judicial authorities both forward, in the sense of its impact on civil life, and backwards, in the sense of the way in which the organization of civil life determines the possibility for a subject-in-vacuum. by the counter-vacuum in this instance then, of course, its not meant a developmental phase, or necessarily even an enviornmental emptiness, or the sudden dissolution of context or narrative, but rather, an enviornment that exposes that the young girl partially exists only as a subject related to objects pertaining to the aesthetic order of post-reinessance venice. the dissolution of the child then becomes a dissolution of liberty in as much as she could be replaced from the desires that underscore her purchase, her enslavement, or her existing in that enviornment.
"then one day, during a visit to a country estate, he encountered another, and younger, object of interest. she brought him his morning coffee when he was still in bed: “i am lucie, the daughter of the concierge. i have neither brothers nor sisters, and i am fourteen years old. i am very glad you do not have a valet, for i will serve you myself, and i am sure that you will be content.” he was content indeed, drinking his coffee and admiring her beauty as she sat on the end of his bed."
as a matter of fact, the very existence of a valet underscores this same principle. for what reason could a valet exist, for what reason could a valet be interested in you? in this work, her young age is only even mentioned in the context of libertine pedophilia to underscore the way that old and about to die casanova actually imagines her youth and perverts that fantasy to himself, not as an example of an otherwise quite regular teen romance even today. but the real issue of serving someone simple arrangements like clothes and food, or sitting at the edge of their bed in and of itself exemplifies a social order. this social order behaves with various properties about itself. at one instance, sitting on the bed of a man may be an honor, a duty, a responsibility, an interest, an opportunity or an encounter – and at others, a bother, a destruction of human right, a removal of agency, or at its worst, a fundamentally arbitrary act without any social value. this social value actually is retrospected with the cultural accumulation of nostalgia, and with the denial of the entire category of courtship.
as such, interest itself depends on the non-assumption of valetism, of the non-assumption of servitude, of the erotic character of servitude. and in much the same way, it also depends on the erotic assumption that to deny the law, to deny the will of civil duty, to deny the will to be responsible to a community or peoples, only makes sense within the conjunction that the girl's will itself is secretly admired, or continued, or her existence validated within this erotically enclosed vacuum. in many ways, it is exactly this vacuum, this characteristic social assemblege, that makes courtship possible to begin with. and its this same one that turns romance dirty, that breaks with the possibility of human character, that arranges the anti-social power of sexuality. social models of organization don't help in this arrangement so much as they stain it, because the assumption of seduction always ontologically proceeds and occurs in retrospect to a positioning in a room, to the ability to interact whatsoever.
this ability exists quite outside of the economy of sovereignity, and as such, this power is removed, or in other words, held in existing assumption or in absolute. in that way, servitude itself when removed from the chain of possibility also underscores the way in which a re-insertion of possible agency then makes its place, or calls on itself to enact its will. at every moment, this possible agency fragments the possibility of weight, and removes the slavery, the lack of choice, or better yet, the social positioning that turns interests and desires into tangible proxies, into existing states, into genuienly rebellious acts. a true love and passion happens within the pockets of the system that emphasize a logic so foreign to it that they feel like a mark of betrayal towards a system. in this way, pedophilia didn't exist back then because the symbolic value that underscored it was only within the metaphysical assumption of trafficking, and was only in retrospect to the tragedy of early death as a generalizable condition. every time a human metaphysical violence occurs, somewhere else, an erotic charge spawns, comes to life. the withdrawal of the status of thing gets transmogulated into the living breath of the indirect propagator.
"at fourteen, lucie was almost twice the age of franceschini’s prey, but, for casanova, the childlike quality of lucie was precisely her allure, and the exploratory foray of his libertine hand tested not only her innocence but his own sense of guilt and responsibility. though he claimed to feel none, blaming her and her parents for their carelessness, nevertheless the monitoring of his own conscience was an inseparable part of the titillation that her innocence excited."
in the ever-new state of today, the ability to be innocent is a title. "child, the innocent", a sigil of protection, and an authorization that whatever harm does occur to you will appear as illegible, in so far as you yourself are illegible, and protected thus, by agents who hold to this contract only if your non-activity holds them as legible of your own fate, in turn for not disrespecting their moral order. in the same way, the extension of a libertine hand and the innocence it proposes is an innocence tied truly not to the innocence of being unassuming about the possibility of a devious act, even in casanova's own time, but instead tied to a general state of carrying yourself over. if your legibility is excused by your parents lack of felt responsibility, then your legibility becomes your own object.
if your legibility becomes your own object, then you are required to authenticate yourself. your own self-authentication then is the subject of a compromise between your enviornment's vision of you and your own inner instinct, an instinct that positions you as an agent of the economy of civil life. in this economy, you have the purchasing power of an agent with specific rulesets, or specific orientations. one of these possible orientations is to take a path that produces certain outcomes, a self-reification. yet another, is to produce an effect of considered value. both of these don't let you leave the economy of civil life and enter into the economy of sovereignity, however. and even if in the contemporary world, these two economies start being tradable and exchangable, in casanova's time, to deny the economy of civil life was to deny its economization, but not its civility.
it was not an act of power or taboo so much as it was the reinstatement of a life order. today's pedophile cannot reinstate a life order through his actions, since whatever acts he does commit would already be too legible. a part of the modern trick was to data-fy the body, empty the subjectivity, and mark it up, making it endlessly desirable. even virginity itself turned from a region, a concrete goal, into a part of the skin. many think that virginity is still a mental emblem, or a physical boundary between worlds, but much rather, it appears to "cover" the skin, to emphasize itself over it, like a targeted veil, or rather, the moment the body starts to compromise. a part of this non-compromise, this total appearance of the body, was the same metaphysical virginity really or wholly present in lucie. it is not so much that the contemporary subject has a body whose skin becomes debatable, modifiable, transposable, additive, or so on, but rather, than the skin-membrane itself takes on a new role. so to say, a fresh or clean skin in modern terms is equivalent to a body who defies, denies or overcomes its own "happening-in-an-enviornment" its own claim to be over itself. this claim-to-be is that same neoliberal conjunction, the presentation of the body as a status symbol of its own overcoming of its enviornment, which in turn, removes it from being able to "lose its virginity" in any real quantifiable way. a subject that carries itself as if it was never a virgin cannot possibly lose it.
this same lucie carried this virginity as the ability to appear unbounded to the economy of civil life, as a mark not of skin but of presentation, which means of belonging to the enviornment, of being that which appears to sit on the bed as yet an agent that wholly seperates from that obligation as a somebody. and it is that which makes her encounter pure, or rather, possible at all. a supermarket worker cannot appear outside of their spot, and contains nothing possible to tell you. innocence is not a naiveity, or incapacity, or asymmetry, but an equillibrium of felt mode of living and felt apperance capacity. servitude only makes that possible by forcing that exchange, by allowing appearance to take precedent temporarily over being. it is only the economization of sovereignity that tags it as a target, that allows the court to question its legibility. and as such, its a mistake to treat cultural legibility as the real creator of a sexual image, or split for eroticization. this split could exist rather at the level of conveyance.
"rousseau gave the concept its most famous and original formulation in emile in 1762. “love childhood [aimez l’enfance],” he commanded his readers. “encourage its games, its pleasures, its lovable instinct. which of you has not sometimes longed for the age when laughter was always upon the lips, when the soul was always at peace. why would you wish to take from these innocents the joy of such a short time that is slipping away from them, of such a precious good that they cannot abuse?” rousseau meant to perorate against a dreary system of formal education that robbed children of their childhood, but his message also emphasized that childhood’s innocence could be brutalized and abused. rousseau himself was not immune to the erotic appeal of children’s innocence, and there was perhaps an ambivalent libertinism implicit in his injunction to “love childhood,” his plea not to deprive children of their innocence."
wolff's reading of rousseau allows us a historical viewpoint into understanding why people think sexual assault is so harmful today, or rather, how it has become the ultimate crime. every sensitivity, even the idea of evil itself, innocence as agency, virgin purity, small indictments and witnesses, accounts of embarassement, courts and justice, all of this becomes central to the question for them. it is no wonder now that pedophilia has been transmuted into the ultimate tabboo, since the enlightenment project itself carries with it this very latent assumption, this very possibility that rousseau's minor perverted reading of a preserved childhood later spawned the ability to break it, to enact the fantasy of robbing the ability for another being to experience a full and meaningful sense of the world. at the same time, this meaningful sense of the world is that which projected onto a being robs the imaginator of possessing it.
rousseau's fantasy itself is kind of the fantasy of the tabboo itself rather than the act. if you can already do that act but dont presume innocence, elements of assault may not necessarily exist, but for it to truly become a sexually violating act, something of a sexual nature in must actually preceede the rupture of law or community itself. furthermore, in a sense, we can see the entire illusion of childhood innocence itself as rousseaus fetish, a counter fantasy of innocence that is involved in this production. the entire court later basically is almost like a conservatorship of an uncontained power, the power of the image of a childs innocence, which only came to arise shortly after the invention of the press, when it was discovered that suggestivity can replace analytical meaning in children.
the annoyance, the fundamental metaphysical annoyance, the frustrating vulgarity, the cheap coincidence of the act of rape, is reflected in this suffrage, in this idea of a posession of a virtue that allows a being to be a certain way. the "natural dispositions" of a youth realistically appear only as broader patterns, but to the paranoid pedophiliac, they are a testament to a higher truth they seek to attain. or rather, to protect the being by breaking a covenant. this idea is a projection precisely because the supposed innocence underneath is only a mode, or rather, a circumstance of a mode, a conjunction of appearance. the being within an area gets imprinted into the air, or rather, only appears to float around. the pedophile enacts a stabilization manuever, seeking to over-determine. what is determinable about being? he asks. or, what is left to determine.
"the company of this angel caused me to suffer the pains of hell. in my continual temptation to cover her physiognomy with kisses, when, laughing, she put her face two inches from mine while telling me she wished she were my sister, i guarded myself well against taking her hands between mine. if i had given her one sole kiss, the whole edifice would have been blown up into the air, for i felt myself becoming a thing of straw. when she left, i was always astonished at having won the victory, but insatiable for laurels i longed to see her return the next day for the renewal of the sweet and dangerous combat. . . . after ten to twelve days, i found i either had to stop, or else become wicked. i chose to stop because nothing made me feel sure of obtaining the reward of my wickedness [scélératesse] through the consent of the object."
naturally, casanova believes himself to somehow be somehow in retrospect to his possibility of her, but in reality, appears to be playing a game of catch with himself, the attaining of an object is a burden of a moral battle, which itself is a fetish, which itself is an empasse, which itself is a moment in time that the economy of civil life let slip into a domestic moment. this same slipperiness is characteristic of women's existence within the confines of man, which characterizes more of a moment in time. the being-in-space, the master bedroom, the couch, the materials, the spaces, the idea of a pillow, the strong table, the ability for a woman to lay down or experience grief or dissapointment, the expressivity, the closeness of her face and her wishes, these are domestic emblems. already, the woman's presence there is at once fleeting and at once tied to a desire she cares not for. this desire is a domestic ritual, a secondary confinement of a desire, a sort of "slip-up" of conventional rhetoric. when casanova confronts her or comes face to face with the possibility of attaining her, his giddiness is that of a person interested in the prospect of something.
what else is there to "prospect" about, not to ruminate but really to consider as if committing a real act of mischief, than of the desacrilized and dirty body of a woman-in-place. the sovereign vision of economization would characterize this body as a set of circumstances in motion rather than stillness, and coincidentally, allow it the liberty to self-establish to the extent that it vanishes. if anything, the nakedness of child's body in venice is the anti-image of the nakedness of the clothed woman today, one being a revelation and the other being an emptying out, a re-joining of the human.
the adult woman, clothed and aware, becomes her own human, de-furniturizes, but also takes leave of all possibility of becoming by creating a zone of authentification around her body, which can only be unlocked through literal ritual conventions such as consent, consideration, civil metrics, or literal civil prescriptions such as ages, pre-assumed desires, contracts (abstract or literal) or con-singings onto (the signing of a possibility). the counter-vacuum then becomes the new furniture shop, where consent-farming becomes the shopping spree of legitimacy. acts of seeking by a male become the furniture necessary to coat the existence of the now-naked body into the authorization ritual, which is a latent mating ritual divorced of suffrage. the suffrage that constituted the original experience of trafficking in reinessance venice is the forceful exteriority of contemporary sadomasochism which focuses on top of the body the destructive will of abstraction rather than the will of destruction which follows the economic-suspending vacuum space into the furniturization otherwise latent to a libertine
"she, however, was too innocent to appreciate them and remonstrated: “you would banish me from your presence, because your love makes you afraid. what would you do if you hated me? am i guilty because i have caused you to fall in love? if that is a crime, i assure you that i had no intention of committing it, and you cannot in good conscience punish me for it.” thus, the issue of innocence, guilt, and crime was peculiarly twisted so that it was she, the child, who pleaded her case before him, the libertine, urging him to countenance his own love for her. “my dear abbé,” she exclaimed, reminding him of his junior ecclesiastical status, “if love is a torment for you, i am sorry about that, but would it be possible for you to have been born and not to love?” casanova recognized in her naive speech “the eloquence of nature,” and, he, born to love if anyone ever was, surrendered to her romantic reasoning and took lucie in his arms."
this is the moment, the eloquence of nature, the moment where casanova recognized this image of the child within the confines of the economy of civil life. the "eloquence of nature" is a commandment by the positionality of the young girl within a sphere of non-authentification, a revelation of possible alterity, the over-determination of a supposed naivety (even if agential) into the perverted rhetoric of a will to prescribe a post-conditional state, a furniturization of the woman into a certain codex, her placement in a world, a covenant, a delination, a situatedness in a non-situation, the vacuuming, the de-economization of her body, the removal of the ability to re-consider the sovereignty granted by the very idea of the posession of the body. a useless provocation in speech, a constant bodily provocation, an intimate moment – that is the closure of the woman onto man. the moment she falls into the hands of casasnova, she creates the force of perversion necessary to facillitate an untagged intervention between the felt mode of leaving and the appearance of being, the moment where a body becomes truly liberal, like that of eve's, and that force of perversion is what the very concept "innocence" is supposed to portray.
in a sense, casanova believes himself to even exemplify this role of servitude towards the servitude of the woman, one servitude bounded to an ability (a proxy) towards the woman, another servitude as a fundamental mode of being the woman carries with her in the space, granting her the power of a sexuality that does not wholly belong to her seperately from this occurance. many believe a woman's sexuality belongs to her body, found in her legs or hips, or in her way of acting towards the world, which could be furthest from the truth. the pornographic quality inherent in physiognomy itself reveals itself the more culturally embedded this form becomes, but this then empties the form of significance and carries it into the fetish of variation or the fetish of the economic possibility of its encountering or its posession. the real sexuality naturally must contain within itself a degree of social intruige, a metaphysical question so severe, and most importantly, a suffrage so plentiful, that behind it, the idea of the defeat of the economy of civil life pertains to the equivalization of the the image of the woman's body to this function.
casanova puts it best: "i have never found any occupation more important. feeling that i was born for the sex opposite to mine, i have always loved it and done all that i could to make myself loved by it." it is not so much a sex that casanova speaks of than it is an ability to create a toleration for the body of a woman. this essential function is what he should ideally mean by opposite sex, not to so much as a fair or faithful or approximate or equal meeting between partners or a shared image of human belonging or any sort of dirty necessitated transference, but rather, an androgenous, systematic, cold and proxying maintenance of a possibility of de-economizing servitude towards granting a most exubrant erotic destitude, or a sexual fascism in other words, or even better yet, an orientation towards women, a moment of recognition that carries all your actions within her otherwise functionally useless while-stead (while, instead).
by sexual fascism here it is of course meant that the object of recognition is displaced by an instrumentalization that the entire act of guidance casanova could possibly commit can only serve as both something to commit for-himself, but also as something aiding the concept, the assumed live metaphysical "stacking" of a "happiness" which is really a collected trace of memories-that-ontologize (not literally, but that culturally flow through the libertine's own passion, that "exist somewhere in the world as having happend", equally banal as the death which produces nothing afterwards - that still creates an arbitrary reason for acts cohering in radically rupturing ways
or the radical rupture of agency itself as the question of the ontology behind death, that gather all the passions of the women and transpose them over their living selves, ridding their own ontology of coherence, and ridding the point of a relationality if it is not for the function of a proxy, where of course, a sexual fascism delinates this by showing how much the object of desire can be transmitted through the subject carrying that desire to end up in a functionalization that betrays the original object-motif not objetit petite a, but a finished, actualizable goal that exists to proxy through sexualization, rather than sexualization having to carry its own drift in order to actualize its own self-disposed motive - or its own displaced desire. the difference here is between the idea that the object of desire is displaced into endless desires, or that the object of desire is displaced into an even higher order albeit unknown desire, as opposed to in sexual fascism's case
where the anthropogenic (second order desire) itself is displaced, not for other desires, or for ones that reveal themselves as having been the real successors or higher-order states of desire inherent in that desire itself, but to a locatable, equal-level desire, which itself reveals itself immediately upon the point it disposes of the proxy (the act of original desire) but even having advertized itself prior as a movement that locates potential value only in its ability to create the state necessary to dispose of original desire (creating a second-order desire of the disposability of that desire) which through its cultivation of an alternate, second object of desire, actually carries this logic into its finality, by revealing desire itself as corrupt, but in a way that denies even its original pull, rather than affirming and denying it on top of its own object of authorization (the idea of desire present in desire).
wolff recounts "the unembarrassed account of sex with barberina further emphasized her inexperience, as she eagerly disposed of her virginity with casanova. he seemed to feel that he was doing her a favor, or, indeed, that he was indulging the importunate whim of a child."
"for these children casanova had a vocabulary of description that evocatively expressed their barely pubescent appeal. he had hoped to interrogate cecilia—“mon petit ange” (my little angel)—about bellino’s genitals, to establish whether the latter was male or female, but the girl, with her mother’s encouragement, offered herself in the place of her ambiguous sibling. she was “charming” in bed ... cecilia went to take her treasure (three dabloons) to her mother, who, crying with joy, confirmed her faith in divine providence.” indeed, eternal fidelity would have been a peculiar promise to make to a twelve-year-old girl whose alleged virginity had just been purchased by a payment to her piously avaricious mother."
casanova's genitals interrogation is a type of latent cleansing-oriented smoothing over of social function, a type of interrogation of the basic will (or lack thereof) of a prepubescence, or rather, a literal pedophilic urge to come to a conclusion, a more vital conclusion of the posession of a child, not as property but of their soul, or a posession of their will. the divine providence element is an economization of theology that encounters the payment not as a commodification of the body (as in the case of human trafficking) but of a more primal humbling of the constitutions of the body. this is present just as much in de sade himself “her childhood (she was barely ten), her pretty lively little face, the splendor of her birth, everything excited me, everything enflamed me." it is also made all the more elevent by the later line:
"casanova, writing about her in his memoirs, cast her in the role of a child, not troubling to evade the implications of her youth. “she unfolded for me all the amorous ideas of her soul. she spoke to me in detail of all that she knew how to do. she displayed all her doctrines, and she detailed all the occasions that she had had to make herself a grand mistress in the mysteries of love.” thus, in a farcical spirit, he recorded the childishness of her chatter, ridiculing her pretenses to adult sexual sophistication, even as he prepared to have sex with her himself, in this case with no scruple about her virginity, which he rather doubted anyway."
the question of whether she is really a virgin is the idea that the economy of civil life itself cannot ruin a depurification of the soul, the "amourous ideals of the soul" is that exact idea that experiences can be assesed through encountering the human in their total appereance in a certain state, especially an auto-vulnerable one. this "humbling" of the body quickly becomes for the pedophile a "providence" in so far as the paternalistic positioning of power as questioning but also facilitating removes the parental guardianship of the mother and decontextualizes the body, bringing it into a type of "harvest". much like how locating aspects of the soul determines them, shares them, makes them viral, casanova is essentially relinqushing, to an extent even, predatorially exorcising the civil responsibilities out of the child. these civil responsibilities are not a field of trauma, or a field of naiveity, but a latent positioning, a de-civilizing not of civilizational assumption, not of repressed libido or subconscious, not a presentation or representation of evil, but a simple change of modus. this change of modus serves simply to de-economize the body, but cannot lay claim to any sort of "nature" by any means, since this nature itself cannot assume an immediate freedom from the assumptions latent in its being, if it be free only of economy
clearly, to many and all pedophiles, the child itself is an image-asset of a deauthorizing of drives, and of a sovereignty that preceeds an economic sovereignty of basic positioning. this capture of the subject preceeds the subjects drive precisely because it becomes authenticated through it. the authenticating mechanism of things such as consent, agency, informativability, correspondence, fair or organic relationality and so on is a civil mechanism which produces not a particular subject in the general sense of the law, but organizes a procedure which allows the generation of an aesthetics.
this aesthetics, this mode of being, can only come to be if on the one hand the sovereignity is not using it as a proxy to consider power, and on another hand, the economy does not use it as a metaphor for trading on law itself (restrictions about restriction-implicit things) but where restrictions are able to position this exact subject to land in this spot, to be able to be predated in such a way. the asset-image-metaphor is made clear by casanova himself: “those who say that life is only a collection of misfortunes mean that life itself is a misfortune,” wrote casanova. “these people have written thus without good health, without a purse full of gold, and without the contentment of the soul that comes from holding in their arms the like of cecilia and marina, and being confident of having others of that sort in the future.” happiness is the ability to bypass an image of the law and to intensify not a contenment but a containment, the "armed holding" of an "innocent" class.
this latent drive to turn against the law however creates another explicit economy, one where the libertine pedophile has to wager against the possibility of encountering this very same being in an organic manner. casanova slowly starts to turn to mothers who gamble, or parents who are already seeking to sell their children into any form of trafficking or slavery. this happens partially because as the law attempts to produce subjects which should be expected to decide or wager on their own economization as a freedom of the choice of others as implied by a freedom on their own behalf to facilitate who makes this choice of reification to begin with, casanova must turn away from the ability to create a dependency and into the necessity to seek one already-formed. and so he rights:
“it pleases me infinitely when i am in a dark room, and i see the light through a window looking toward an immense horizon.” his dark room was, inevitably, a bedroom, and, like don giovanni, like franceschini, he looked out upon a social horizon of multifarious female forms, of all kinds and all ages, and it pleased him to imagine them all, by turns, in the room with him, the human proof that life is happiness."
his spectacle turns however into that same fetish of variation that naturally becomes a subject to the economy of civil life rather than the servitudal enterprise of the non-belonging yet appearing being. so how come this state has arrived? outside of the obvious reliance on lower class positions, many of them corrupt and halfy-formed from the start, casanova also sees his own quest as a hunt rather than a deliberation, an immense horizon of possibilities which he can scam and launder himself through. these "multifarious female forms" then naturally succumb and fall into one another, becoming a part of the orgy of the social machine rather than an act of liberation towards what he calls the opposite sex, or an ultimate consideration of their love.
these quarrels produce such horrendous elements such as "casanova stopped short of intercourse, not for concerns of conscience but only because they could not agree on a price for her virginity." and "casanova, now forty, had no trouble settling on the price of a thirteen-year-old russian peasant girl, advertised as a virgin, and purchased not as a prostitute for a single night but as a slave who would belong to him for the duration of his stay in russia". an interesting impasse also happens with this line “the pleasure i had in hearing her speak to me in venetian was inconceivable.” where the pleasure of creating an implicit new national orientation just for a subject to be sexualized is itself not entirely locatable neither in the economy of sovereignty nor in that of civil life, a dark grey zone that seems to partake both in the fetish of negotiation and the fetish of the destruction of the power of happenstance and expected commonstance, including the ability of ordering the exception.
“my powers of reasoning evaporated before this sprite of thirteen years, more naked than dressed, beautiful as a celestial spirit. under the compulsion of a bold, impetuous passion, she sucked up my soul between her parted lips and breathed her own soul into my mouth in return.” the seemingly celestial innocence of childhood revealed itself as a sort of demonic depravity. gozzi’s attitude of moral condemnation was all the more emphatic because he himself, in the intervening decades, had become a conservative moralist in eighteenth-century venetian intellectual life, an enemy of the enlightenment, and no advocate for the liberty of the libertines."
what appears as an even funnier retrospect is the idea that the libertine himeslf, albeit attempting to dispose through the bodies of children two seperate forms of economic disposession, also are able to cultivate the idea of seduction as the counter-drain of their own souls, as a law that creates an economy of nature, or otherwise, a successive battle between impulsive beings over who gets to control the ability to appear, command or cultivate a characteristic set of activities, or to stain the perceived or accustomed identity of the other side. the question of errotic innocence is again, less about power, naiviety, whims or truths, and more about the fundamental way in which a particular relation can come about, exemplified through the eroticity that arises, through the command of impulse and the impulse to command (and to appear commanding as such "it was morally convinient to remember it later as her fault").
“at the age of forty-nine it seemed to me that i should hope for nothing more from fortune, the exclusive friend of youth and the declared enemy of mature age,” wrote casanova, who wanted to go home. “it seemed to me that in venice i could live happily without having need of the favors of the blind goddess.”
the pedophile, necessarily, must imagine himself as a child, as somebody wholy irrelevant to the idea of age itself as a valid descriptor of maturity. plenty of times casanova himself describes this, as he seems to believe sexual maturity is distant from life experience, especially since age itself serves as a metric encapsulating a civil life service, an economic one. yet, the imagination also takes place in the form of a "declared enemy" able to battle the sovereignty of counter-servitude, or, as somebody who resists the law not because of the law's sake, but because of its ability to command (a battle of commands, if you will).
the alter ego of sade, a depraved monk, states in wolff's collection: “without doubt the most ridiculous thing in the world,” said dom clément, “is to want to dispute about human tastes, to contradict them, to blame them or punish them if they are not conformant to the laws of the land that one inhabits, or to the social conventions. what! men never understand that there is no type of tastes, however bizarre, however criminal even one may suppose them, that do not depend upon the type of organization that we have received from nature!” yet, of course, this "nature" is not as sade would like to claim it, a law of impulse, a mechanical man with free-ranging inspirations and passions, but rather, an economy of nature (not of nature as such but of its naturalization by a particular domestication of civil presentation) that is built not necessarily by a libertine, but by that very same institution-suspending vacuum that creates the necessary social state where a young girl could be molested to begin with (or in contemporary society, where she could, the more agency she loses, and the more abstracted she appears from her own ability to whatsoever even persist in the world)