Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 55

Peddling Eros

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are of disintegration, of the dissolution of bonds (both concrete,
biochenucal as well as figurative), which set free odors. Our modem
obsession with body odor and its commercial presentation as
destructive of an individual's social life if not counteracted, is only
one manifestation of this prinaordial nexus. Good smells, on the other
hand, mean attraction, eroticism, sexuality, birth, life; they mean
the creation of bonds. The modem perfume industry is explicitly
marketing this (erotic) attraction, irresistibility, and charisma. The
mythical force involved is Eros.^^ Freud’s model also accounts for the
gender coding of smell. The eternal feminine—as well as female—
Aat attracts "us," the male, the Faustian feminine erotic, is in fact
its smell. Indeed our cultural semiotics casts the male as the smeller,
the female as the olfactorily perceived object.
Freud's, however, is not the whole story. The sense of smell does
not simply atrophy once its central function of regulating sexuality is
allegedly diminished. The loss of importance that Freud diagnoses is
certainly not one of actual physiological capacities but rather one of
social functionality. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in
Dialectic of Enlightenment^^ propose a different view, yet related to
Freud's, of the essential functioning of smell and the combination of
fear, shame, and desire that modem civilization associates with this
sense.
Of all the senses, smelling, which is stimulated
without objectifying, testifies most clearly to the urge
to abandon and assimilate oneself to the Other . . . .
In the act of seeing one renutins oneself, in smelling
one dissolves . . . . Civilized man is permitted such
pleasure only when it can be justified in the name of
real or seemingly practical purposes. The tabooed
drive can only be indulged when it is unmistakably
clear that such indulgence aims at its eradication.^'^
This is a good sunrunary of the general enlightenment attitude
toward smell and in particular of the views of the philosopher
Inunanuel Kant. For him the sense of smell, leading manldnd to clean
up its environment and eliminate sources of stench, undermines its own
raison d'etre in the process. I believe that a combination of