Having chafed at the misogyny
present in F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of
Futurism, the French writer and artist Valentine de Saint-Point published her
own Manifesto of Futurist Woman in
response to Marinetti’s foundational document in 1912. In the manifesto, she
outlined the characteristics and motivations of the ideal futurist female figure
– an “Überwoman” immune to sentimentality – and began her thinking on the purpose
and meaning of lust in futurism. One year later, she would publish Futurist Manifesto of Lust, a document dedicated
to analyzing and activating lust from a futurist perspective. These manifestos
would spur heated debate around the positioning of women in the futurist
movement. Futurism, however, was not a movement de Saint-Point sought to align
herself with, and less than two years after the publication of Manifesto of Futurist Woman, she claimed
that she was not a futurist.
de Saint-Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust operates
around a single thesis, expressed plainly in both the opening and final sentences:
lust is a force. She spends the entire essay advocating strongly on lust’s
behalf, scorning the “moral preconceptions” she feels limit its boundless
potential. She sees lust as “an essential part of life’s dynamism,” hindered by
Christian moralizing and modesty. She calls it a virtue of a strong race and a
powerful source of energy, likening it it to pride.
For de
Saint-Point, however, lust is a complex energy fraught with contradictions. She
spends a signficant portion of her manifesto dissecting and elaborating on
these contradictions and complications: how it is simultaneously the “painful
joy of wounded flesh” and “the joyous pain of a flowering,” how it is “sensory”
and “sensual,” how it is a force for creation and for destruction. As proof of
its simultaneous creative and destructive nature, she states how it is “normal”
for a victorious army to rape those they have conquered “so that life may be
re-created.”
Much of de
Saint-Point’s manifesto explores lust through the lens of war. Futurists were
champions of war, art, and war as art, and de Saint-Point shares in this thinking.
She calls art and war “the great manifestations of sensuality,” and lust the “flower”
of those manifestations. She places it in a historical context regarding war,
stating that it fueled primitive man’s drive to conquest and glorious return. She
goes on to say that her contemporary context is no different, as the lustful
soldiers of yesteryear are the lustful businessmen of today. Lust’s status as “the
magnificent exaltation of strength” and as the only way the “constantly
battling energies” of soldiers (or businessmen) can be “unwound and renewed” remains
unchanged across centuries.
Towards the final third of her manifesto, de Saint-Point changes to declarative, first person plural statements, placing herself and her audience in the futurist movement and issuing a call to action. She implores her audience to “stop despising Desire” and instead despise the sentimental, nostalgic, and romantic elements that “disfigure” desire, including false modesty, cowardice, and moonlight duets. She views burying such a triumphant and renewing force under smug sentimentality as the greatest crime one can commit against lust. She implores her audience to shirk fragility and confront lust with the conscious intention of making it into a work of art. Lust is an “eternal battle,” and to engage in this battle is to make war and art.
The
manifesto closes with repeated insistences that lust is a force, albeit one
that we can never fully possess. In the final moments, de Saint-Point writes that lust is the force "that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid,
intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.” Lust not only compels
soldiers to victory and glory in war, it is a battle in and of itself
that one can never definitively win. It is in these final moments that we realize that
de Saint-Point doesn’t merely believe that lust is the force that compels us to
battle. She believes that lust is the battle itself.
1 comment:
Well, first things first, let me commend you for being.... first, for posting your work without a banister and setting a standard. Strictly speaking, your opening paragraph providing the textual context of the response to Marinetti, the *Manifesto of Futurist Women* is not part of what a precis *has* to do. A precis, at its most basic, is just an effort to summarize or recapitulate or epitomize an encountered argument on its own, often logically propositional, terms. Adding the context is great, but gravy, from our point of view -- contextualizing and pressuring figures and other strategies inevitably come into play as a precis gets elaborated into a closer interpretive reading. Anyway, all this is not to criticize you, but to point out that you have gone above and beyond the constraints of the assignment, and that this is appreciated.
The precis proper, beginning in paragraph two is also excellent. You identify the thesis or claim of the piece and then observe the claim is repeated at the beginning and at the end. I would have appreciated a reading of the fact that this repetition is in fact a mis-citation, and whether you think the differences in the two matter. This is especially interesting to think about given your emphasis in the more richly detailed readings of the following paragraphs that "lust is a complex energy fraught with contradictions." While nobody would mistake Saint-Point's disruptive lust as a happy clappy progressive force, especially given the literal and figurative celebrations of the unprecedented horrors of industrial warfare to which you draw our attention, I do agree that the constructive/deconstructive work of desire is generating paradoxical effects that complicate an entirely reactionary reading of the manifesto. There is a real question for me whether Saint-Point manages to undercut the techno-fixated aspiration for self-mastery and control suffusing the Italian Futurists milieu in her repudiations of possession/self-possession, or whether she depends on and buttresses these while at once disavowing them.
You note in your fifth paragraph that there is a shift into the declarative (remarkable given how insistent the manifesto manages to be from word one) and a call to action. As you go on to point out this call to action is another paradox, inasmuch as Saint-Point is interesting in the promising and provocative breaking of orthodoxies and taking up of opportunities, the opening up of futurity here is not the facilitation of ends but an end-in-itself ("lust is the battle itself," in your felicitous phrase). In this, "lust" is operating a bit like the queer does in a text from later in the class by Lee Edelman. When you humorously say that Saint-Point sketched an "uberwoman" in her earlier manifesto, I assume this is an allusion to Nietzschean "overcoming" and you may remember from our discussions of Nietzsche in Crit A that Saint-Point's ambivalence on this score has lots of antecedents in tow.
This is a model precis. Clearly and even elegantly written throughout, managing to capture quite a lot of the substance of the piece admirably concisely, and then (as I require no one to do in this exercise, but am happy to see in those who go above and beyond) grappling with some of the problems at hand and even providing a brief textual context for the argument. Excellent!
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