Transatlantic Displacements of the “Venus-in-Furs” Motif

(Johns/Rauschenberg, Thek/Sontag)^*

Mena Mitrano

English abstract

1 | Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, ca. 1955. Combine: oil, enamel, fabric, newsprint, printed reproductions, cardboard, and tissue paper on silk. 17 7/8 x 18 1/8 in. (45.4 x 45.9 cm). Private collection. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. RRF Registration# 56.013.

In this article I do not presume to say anything new on the novella Venus in Furs (1870) by Leopold Sacher-Masoch; I do wish, however, to take my cue from the sign under which, according to Gilles Deleuze, that text is: the enigmatic, mysterious relation of flesh, fur, and mirror (Deleuze [1967] 1996, 79). The compound noun in my title “Venus-in-furs” will refer not only to these items clustered together, but also to the potential of the cluster to put to work certain concepts that have by now become embedded in a shared critical-theoretical sensibility. First and foremost, the notion of the image, both in the sense of technological reproduction, the copy, and in the psychoanalytic sense of imago. Secondly, and related to the first, the fictional direction of the I (image/mirage). Thirdly, and branching from the previous two, the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze. The mysterious relation of these elements effects the impression of a cultural inclusion. Approaching the Venus-in-furs motif as a possible anchorage of this conceptual cluster, and its effect, these notes track the displacement and transformation of the motif along transatlantic routes and find that such displacement and transformation become intertwined with the problematic of the surface as a prime metaphor for alternative views of the thinking subject.

I. Remnants

Texts are colored by place and time. They travel across geographical locations, and with each relocation they are altered: “Across time, every text must put up with readers on different wavelengths, who come at it tangentially and tendentiously, who impose semantic losses as well as gains” (Wai Chee Dimock 1997, 1061). This checks-and-balances logic of reparation helps in the task of forwarding a more democratic vision of literature (Wai Chee Dimock 1997, 1060), but it could be argued that the focus on a reading activity that subsists by imposing losses and gains overshadows the problem of an irreducible distance with which texts reach us. From this perspective, Eugen Fink’s introduction to the seminar on Heraclitus (co-taught with Heidegger) is fascinating. Heraclitus, Fink says, is a thinker “who remains for us at an unbridgeable distance”: a gulf opens as we turn our attention to what the author “has left behind” (Fink 1992, 29). Considering that gulf is important, Fink says, not from the philological point of view but to the extent that it calls on our capacity to walk towards the “thing that must have been before the gaze of” the author (Fink 1992, 29). Heraclitus may be an extreme case here, since his work has been experienced in terms of traces of his work, a work whose wholeness is lost at the origin, a body of remnants or surviving pieces salvaged by others after him. But it would not be preposterous, perhaps, to extend Fink’s notion of “an unbridgeable distance” to work closer to us in time, especially since Fink argues that what was before the gaze of the author “is not simply at hand in the way a remnant might be of any other element that has been handed down linguistically” (Fink 1992, 29). There is a distance in excess of linguistic meaning. This type of distance applies to texts that, like Heraclitus’ fragments, are not whole at the origin, like Heraclitus’ fragments, but it might also apply to difficult texts. In fact, it is this type of distance that Catherine Malabou tries to work when making her way through Hegel’s difficult text. As she does so, she raises the question of the plasticity of reading. Thinking itself, Malabou finds, is not “passive contemplation, but rather an act of reading” (Malabou 2004, 167): “According to Hegel, there is no such thing as an immediate grasping of the absolute, neither, it follows, will there be any such thing as an immediate transparency of meaning . . .Philosophy’s Self, or absolute subject, would indeed remain formless unless shaped into a style by a particular philosophical subjectivity” (Malabou 2004, 167). The plasticity of meaning “is inseparable from a plasticity of reading, a reading which gives form to the utterance it receives” (Malabou 2004, 168).

Venus in Furs begins with the problem of reading. There is a frame. At the end of the frame we learn that the anonymous narrator has fallen asleep while reading Hegel: he has been dreaming of Venus, the Goddess of love, a beautiful woman with “a marble-like body” (15) wrapped in dark sables: “dead stony eyes” (toten Steinaugen), an unchanging gaze looking from a distance (13). The goddess itself seems a collage of pieces: flickering between marble and human-like skin, she is a combine of stone, skin, fur, emerging from a distant world buried under the lava of antiquity, irrupting in a modernity associated with reflection: “you modern men…sons of reflection,” she says in the dream (14).

In combining Severin’s manuscript with the Hegel scene, the text follows up on the contrast between the two modalities of speaking and thinking outlined in the Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit: on the one hand, an “enthusiasm and obscurantism” that “view with contempt” and “intentionally stand aloof from both the concept and from necessity” (Hegel [1807] 2018, 8); on the other, the movement of the concept, which is a path of “expression,” i.e. a movement of externalization, a movement of extension and “formal refinement” (Hegel 2018, 10) that aims at making thought the property of all, a sort of general intellect. Only what is conceptually comprehensible is “capable of being learned and possessed by everybody” (Hegel 2018, 10). The appearance of Venus intercepts the movement of the concept and the path of expression with the question of the image, that is to say of the copy, of reproduction, which, from esoteric property of a few, can become the property of all. Severin takes to the copy. He falls in love with a statue of Venus that is a copy of the original held in Florence. Among the objects amassed in his room there is “a good copy of the famous Venus at the mirror by Titian, at the Dresdener Galerie” (18). He names his “ideal” (23), Venus im Pelz, Venus in Furs, when he comes into possession of a photographic reproduction of Titian’s Venus at the mirror. “Venus in furs” is the hypernym – the broader term of which the various Venuses are members – for the ever-same image in a succession of images.

Kafka draws out precisely this attraction to the copy in The Metamorphosis (Die Vervandlung), where, alluding to Masoch’s text, he has Gregor Samsa, a hero in revolt against his “tired laboring family,” contemplate his own “Venus in furs” in the cut-out from an illustrated magazine. Gregor has cut out the image and housed it in a nice gilded frame: “It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer” (ch. 1). Gregor crawls about and presses himself against it: “He hurried up onto the picture and pressed himself against its glass, it held him firmly and felt good on his hot belly” (ch. 2). By the time Benjamin devotes to the copy sustained theoretical attention, explicating the new desire that the copy announces – the urge “to get hold of an object at close range in an image [Bild], or, better, in a facsimile [Abbild], a reproduction” (Benjamin [1936] 2022, 105) – crucially, that new desire emerges as interconnected to a certain hunger for sameness: a “hunger” to taste what is the same in all places and countries” (qtd. in Hansen 1987, 201). This hunger, in turn, becomes conjoined with the cardinal tenet of Benjamin’s thought: “the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze” (Hansen 1987, 187). The desire to hold the object close in an image is reminiscent of Severin’s attachment to copies. Masoch’s hero pursues the reciprocated gaze with “morbid intensity”: he loves Venus because her smile “corresponds him”: it’s “an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile” – always the same.

But what is the “hunger to taste what is the same in all places and countries” if not another way of inscribing the individual self into the abstract subject of general knowledge, of absolute knowledge, into the I-think? When Benjamin said of the stones of Marseilles, that they were “the bread of my imagination,” the levitation of stones into loaves of bread suggests the extension of a surface and the individual thinker’s incision in it, an incision whose purpose is to bypass the scene of self-consciousness.

In Hegel, the book that Masoch’s anonymous narrator is reading before, having fallen asleep while reading, he awakens to Severin’ story, self-consciousness is wrought through the battle of individuals who appear “in their immediacy one for the other like so many objects” before becoming, through negating Desire, a consciousness identical to itself, that is to say, showing up one for the other as autonomous (Hegel [1807] 2018, 130). Commenting the scene, Alexandre Kojève argues that it is functional to manifesting a human layer that is more than biological (Kojève 1969, 40). The desire for the copy, modulated differently in Masoch, Kafka, and Benjamin, would suggest not only an abrogation of the ‘I’ in the movement toward external reality but indeed a passivity of the ‘I’, which becomes as if included in an extended surface. From this perspective, it is possible to speculate that the adhesion to the image might be an alternative way of securing a “more than biological” ‘I’. And yet, the battle of self-consciousness (which conjures the master-slave imbalance) cannot be bypassed so easily.

II. Transatlantic Crossings I

Witness a compelling entry in the sketchbooks of American Painter Jasper Johns: “Something here, there is the question of ‘seing clearly’. Seeing what? According to what?… ‘Looking’ is and is not ‘eating’ and also ‘being eaten’ ” (Johns [1964] 1996, 37). Looking as eating is eating up; it’s like tasting the same everywhere, being incised in the universal I-think, and being eaten, being swallowed. We hear in Johns’s fragment the perilous oscillation between serene correspondence and destruction, between the subject (looking is) and its radical abrogation or reduction to a biological ‘I’ (being eaten), to an ‘I-am-nothing’ without symbolic cover.

Green Target (1955) amplifies the perilous oscillation. With its green concentric circles, the painting foregrounds the theme of the gaze and related questions of insight and vision. Johns’s target looks like a magnified eyeball, suggesting the fascination with looking and its ambiguous merging of seeing as discerning with a seeing that blasts everything. The obvious reference for Johns, who at the time was a young American artist who chose to paint American national objects familiar to all (like the flag), would be Emerson. More specifically, it would be that dizzy moment in Emerson’s first “Nature” when the magnitude and the transparency of the eyeball is proportional to the urge of shedding the burden of civilization (and civility) and be released from the encumbrance of norms and commands: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition…?” (Emerson 1836, 5). Along this route, Emerson steps into philosophy’s subject – the ‘I-think’ – by way of an abrogation of the’ I-think’ that preserves it in the ‘I-see’: “I am nothing. I see all”: “Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.” (Emerson 1836, 12-13).

The year of Green Target, 1955, is a watershed year for American art. As of 1953, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had instituted, in their domestic privacy, a collaboration akin to an “artistic movement” (Katz 1993, 189), and in 1955 (the same year Johns completed American flag), Rauschenberg began to include the Venus motif in his canvasses. Untitled, dated ca. 1955 (Fig. 1), a combine made with oil, enamel, fabric, newsprint, printed reproductions, cardboard, and tissue paper on silk, represents the transition to a treatment of the canvas as an inscrutable surface, readable only in parts, not as a whole. Rauschenberg embeds a reproduction of Rubens’s version of Venus, Venus in Front of the Mirror (1614-15). He crops the print reproduction to center on the gaze (Fig. 2). In the mirror that frames her face, Venus seems surprised by the gaze of an absent viewer, encountered as if by chance. In Rubens’ goddess, the fur of her predecessor – Titian’s Venus with a mirror (1555) – is abrogated: it is dissolved in a metonymic reciprocity of gazes that takes place outside of the frame. In Untitled (1955), Rauschenberg incorporates the detail from the Old Master in highly autobiographical and inscrutable levels of meaning, relating the mediated self-recognition happening outside of the frame to the condition of the artist. In fact, Rauschenberg uses Venus to render the apparition of the artist: he uses Venus to keep interrogating in this symbol of beauty, the meaning of the artist’s art in his environment.

2 | Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, ca. 1955, detail. Combine: oil, enamel, fabric, newsprint, printed reproductions, cardboard, and tissue paper on silk 17 7/8 x 18 1/8 in. (45.4 x 45.9 cm). Private collection. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. RRF Registration# 56.013.

And the artist appears, like Lacan’s ‘I’, as elusive, suspended to a fictional direction. Jasper Johns emphasized this fictional direction in an interview. When, asked how, as the son of a farmer in Augusta, he ever came to painting, he answered:

When you live in such a place as I did, you search for something, something that represents another possibility, another opportunity. I could also have chosen to become a sailor, but became a painter instead because that was a fantasy (Jaspersen 1969, 134-137).

Rauschenberg matches Johns’s response with Bed (1955), a powerful combine that presents the remains of the terrible struggle of the subject’s becoming (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). In this context, Johns’s Green Target (1955) can be seen as flowing from the two artists’ dialogue, with Untitled (1955), and Rauschenberg’s incorporation of Venus in that painting, standing as if it were a twin painting to Johns’s target.

3-4 | Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, detail, photos by the author, MoMA storage space, Queens, New York, 2018. Combine: oil and graphite on pillow, quilt, and sheet, mounted on wood support. 75 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 8 in. (191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. RRF Registration# 55.004.

Occupying the entire space of the canvas, the target is an expanded surface made sensuous by the artist’s technique: wax encaustic, an unusual technique for a modern artist – the same used in the frescos in Pompei. Rosalind Krauss has argued that the two American painters introduced an art “primarily directed toward a reorientation in thinking” (Krauss [1974] 2002, 42-43). The reorientation in thinking that Krauss detects in their painting has to do with what earlier on I have called the apparition of the artist: it affirms the artist, to use Krauss’ marvelous image, “under the continuous spread of the surface like a splinter under the skin” (Krauss [1974] 2002, 45). Given Johns and Rauschenberg’s habit of overtly referring in their painting to national signifiers (for example, the American flag, President Kennedy, the astronaut, symbol of the American space frontier), the inter-pictorial dialogue between the two artists, mediated by the eros flowing from the Venus motif, has the potential of projecting the continuous spread of an eroticized American surface of incomplete legibility. Johns and Rauschenberg’s art of ideas is the art of this inscrutable surface, where seeing, thinking and reading must become conjoined in the continuous transformation of illegibility.

III. Transatlantic crossings II

When, in 1964, Susan Sontag wrote Against Interpretation, cutting herself off from semantic depth and celebrating instead “an erotics of art,” it is the Rauschenberg/Johns type of incision of the artist-thinker, as Kraus would put it, “like a splinter under the surface” that she had in mind. The entire collection Against Interpretation is dedicated to an artist, Paul Thek, because it is, in fact, the outcome of their collaboration. The Sontag-Thek correspondence shows the traces of their kind of collaboration. Thek writes: “I don’t know who I was, a blind cave fish, etc., you brought me so much, I was in your spell, it was awful, a tonguetied boy, over reaching… by far…You really rearranged my head, where is it now? Dissolved, gone.” (Thek to Sontag, Dec. 5, 1975. Correspondence with Paul Thek, Charles E. Young Library, Special Collections, UCLA).

But the collaboration was decisive for Sontag too. At the time of their friendship, in the early 1960s, Sontag, a philosopher by formation, wanted to shed philosophy’s subject. Sontag and Thek conversed about knowledge of external reality in its sensuous certainty, independent from human consciousness. In a 1965 letter to Sontag, the painter talked about “the big clarity thing” or the “flying quality,” and this matched Sontag’s desire to experience what in “Against Interpretation” she had called “the luminousness of the thing itself”: “Transparence is the highest value in art – and criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself” (Sontag [1996] 2001, 13). Two decades later, Thek recalls: “Our search, as ever, for something … beyond!” (12 March 1987).

The correspondence indicates that Sontag and Thek, a bit like Rauschenberg and Johns, formed if only for a while, a school of two. Thek’s Susan Lecturing on Neitzsche (1987) gives an account of that school.

The spelling mistake in the philosopher’s name bespeaks the admiring stance of the artist-disciple while Sontag, named with her first name to suggest the familiar environment of the school of two, features as the philosopher who is a reader of other philosophers, represented in the act of lecturing on Nietzsche. She steps forward, as Malabou would put it, as one who “gives form to the utterance [she] receives” (Malabou 168). But Nietzsche of course is not just any philosopher. For Sontag, he represented, as she writes in her Graduate Student Notes, the thinker who opposes ‘dogmatic’ philosophy, the thinker-artist-dandy who stresses the question of the relationship between philosophical discourse and literary discourse (Susan Sontag Papers, Charles E. Young Library, Special Collections, UCLA. Box 153, Folder 8, 1960-1964, Graduate Student Notes on Nietzsche). Nietzsche enters Sontag’s universe and occupies a central position in it as an available model for the dramaturgical thinker, the one who pitched to his readers the conflict between aesthetic bliss (Dionysus) and reflection (Ariadne the archetypal interpreter).

Thus, Thek’s Susan Lecturing on Neitzsche (1987) can be considered as a portrait of Sontag. The surface of the canvas acts as a mirror of the subject’s becoming, that is to say, of the philosopher’s incision in the ‘I-think’: “I create the world,” she wrote in her notebooks (1960). But the spelling mistake can mark the incision only because it also bespeaks a private inscrutability woven, as with the Johns/Rauschenberg interpictorial dialogue, with the role of eros. There is an imbalance in this artistic movement of two between the weak position of the admiring Thek and Sontag’s strong position as the thinking subject and subject of speech (lecturing). Yet, the imbalance is precisely what enables the canvas to point to the entanglement of eros and discipleship, thus rendering the painter’s inclusion in an art of ideas. From this perspective, Susan lecturing on Neitzsche is also the painter’s self-portrait, his own subject’s becoming. The spelling mistake marks the reciprocal incision in the surface; it ensures that the ‘I’ is never not anything, while at the same time averting those extreme rites of survival that are implied in masochistic discipline: “Bind me - /I still can sing -/Banish - my mandolin/Strikes true within,” wrote Emily Dickinson. (Poem # 1005; see Mansfield qtd. in Noble 1998, 25).

The spelling mistake has sublimated the effect of the Venus-in-furs motif, by which here I have understood a combine of elements or parts – fur, skin, mirror, surface – which, exuding a theoretical sense and in their mysterious relation, effect the impression of a cultural inclusion/incision.

* I wish to thank the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, especially Gina Guy, who generously shared a rich selection of images in which Robert Rauschenberg used the Venus motif. My gratitude goes to her for making it possible for me to write this article. I also thank Kelsey Tyler from the Gagosian gallery for locating Carol Vogel’s review of the 1995 Rauschenberg show in combination with an Old Masters exhibit.

Riferimenti bibliografici

• Benjamin [1936] 2002
  W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version, tr. by E. Jephcott and H. Zohn, in Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. by H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA 2002, 101-133.
• Deleuze [1967] 1996
  G. Deleuze, Il freddo e il crudele, tr. di Giuseppe De Col, Milano [1967] 1996.
• Dimock 1997
  W.Ch. Dimock, Theory of Resonance, in “PMLA” 112.5 (October 1997), pp. 1060-1071. 
• Emerson 1836
  R.W. Emerson, Nature, Boston 1836.
• Fink-Heidegger 1992
  E. Fink e M. Heidegger, Dialogo intorno a Eraclito, a c. di M. Nobile e M. Ruggenini, Milano 1992.
• Hansen 1987
  M.B. Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, in “New German Critique”, 40 (1987), 179-224.
• Hegel [1807] 2018
  G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by T. Pinkard and M. Baur, in Cambridge Hegel Translations, Cambridge MA 2018. 
• Jaspersen 1996
  G. Jaspersen, Mode med Jasper Johns, in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. by K. Varnedoe, New York 1996, 134-137.
• Johns [1964] 1996
  J. Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. by K. Varnedoe, New York 1996.
• Katz 1993
  J. Katz, The Art of Code: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, ed. by W. Chadwick and I. De Courtrivon, London 1993, 189-251.
• Kojève 1969
  A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. by Alan Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, Ithaca and London 1969.
• Krauss [1974] 2002
  R. Krauss, Robert Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image, in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. by B. W. Joseph, Cambridge MA [1974] 2002, 39-55. 
• Malabou 2004
  C. Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, tr. by L. During, New York 2004.
• Noble 1998
  M. Noble, The Revenge of Cato’s Daughter: Dickinson’s Masochism, “The Emily Dickinson journal” 7, no. 2 (1998), 2-47.
• Sacher-Masoch [1878] 2017
  L. von Sacher-Masoch, Venere in Pelliccia, tr. di G. De Angelis and M. T. Ferrari, Milano 2017.
• Sacher-Masoch [1878] 2012
  L. von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, tr. by F. Savage, New York.
• Sontag 1986
  S. Sontag, Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy, in ‘Veruschka’: Transfigurations, ed. by H. Trülzsch and V. Lehndorff, Boston 1986, 6-12.
• Sontag [1996] 2001
  S. Sontag, Against Interpretation, New York 2001.
• Sontag 1983
  S. Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, New York 1983.
• Vogel 1995
  C. Vogel, Inside Art, in “The New York Times”, Friday, January 27, 1995.

English abstract

In his study of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella, Venus in Furs (1870), Gilles Deleuze proposes that the text is under “the sign of Titian, of the enigmatic relation of flesh, fur and mirror.” In the discussion that follows, I take my cue from the relationality of the three elements - flesh, fur, mirror - and re-unite them under the name of the “Venus-in-Furs” motif with the purpose of exploring the motif’s displacement, transfer, and metamorphosis along transatlantic routes. The compound noun in my title “Venus-in-furs” will refer not only to the three items (flesh, fur, mirror) clustered together in relation, but to the capacity of the cluster to put to work and set in motion certain concepts by now embedded in a shared critical-theoretical sensibility: first and foremost the image (both in the sense of technological reproduction, the copy, and in the psychoanalytic sense of imago); secondly, related to the first, the fictional direction of the ‘I’ (mirage); branching from these two, the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze. I will argue that the mysterious relation of these concepts effects the impression of a cultural inclusion/incision. My main point will be to suggest that the theoretical anchorage of the Venus-in-furs motif enables to trace its transformation, especially along the transatlantic route, in the problematic of the surface. Two case studies of exemplary collaborations in American art and thought, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and Paul Thek and Susan Sontag, will help show that the problematic of a surface inclusion/incision harnesses the discourse on the appearance of the artist/thinking I beyond egoic solipsism.

keywords | Venus-in-furs; Surface; American art; Robert Rauschenberg; Jasper Johns; Paul Thek; Susan Sontag.

questo numero di Engramma è a invito: la revisione dei saggi è stata affidata al comitato editoriale e all'international advisory board della rivista

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: Mena Mitrano, Transatlantic Displacements of the “Venus-in-Furs” Motif (Johns/Rauschenberg, Thek/Sontag), “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 223, aprile 2025.