Abstract

Venus im Pelz is not just a book on masochism, love or the conflict of the sexes, but is also, in its own way, a work that aims to ridicule the philosophy par excellence, that in particular of Kant and Hegel, the great Fathers-Masters of philosophy, capable with their systems to rationalize the theme of voluntary submission, restoring the threatened order. In this direction, the same masochistic subversion, which with Severin had attempted to symbolically depose the Father, as the historical-political-cultural antecedent of Law and power, nevertheless appears destined to recompose, thanks to philosophy and its history, the product themselves of patriarchal speculations, always prompted to cage any singulariity prone to deviate from the trajectory traced by civilization. It is within this patrolling infrastructure that Severin, after «that cruel catastrophe of my life», will continue his existence, converted, from «rebelled by submission», into a new reactionary Father who now uses the whip with women, and that, now healed with its «moral steadiness [...] I learned to work, to fulfill duties» - tamed «with the Kantian ethics of the dignity of moral value that tunes with the Hegelian ethics of the redemption of the servant through the objectification of labor», does not realize that he has become himself an object of power, so that one day he may peacefully die in a rational and productive way.