Abstract

As early as 1864, Walter Pater began to identify not only a homosexual character but also a homosexual intelligence, what we might call in the terms of current criticism, a queer theory. In his first published essay, Pater struggled with Coleridge, the critical father, from whose writing he tried to elicit the authorizing ideas for such a radical theory. Failing that, Pater turned away from Coleridge and the English critical tradition to Winckelmann and the Germanic. In Winckelmann, Pater found a substitute father and an alternative hermeneutic practice that interpolated feeling into the interpretive function. In Winckelmann's finding of Greek art and in his recognition of the Greek ideal, Pater discovered a legitimating precedent for a homosexual inquiry. Pater individuated as a critic and in his next essays, "Aesthetic Poetry" and "Leonardo da Vinci," and began to conceptualize a homosexual world view. Pater's emergent intelligence came to climax in his overdetermined Mona Lisa reverie, which we can take as the origin of Modern queer theory. As medical science and the law began to categorize the homosexual in 1869, Pater was already subtly theorizing it. ;In 1873 in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater queered the Renaissance. He perceived the Renaissance to be what Jonathan Goldberg has called a "crucial and potentially disruptive" movement "in the foundations of the modern socio-sexual order." Pater did not just expose and reveal the representation of same-sex desire but uncovered a whole culture of queer desire, including a set of queer ideas, a series of queer intellectual and artistic acts, a queer psychology and a queer historiography. ;Pater conducted into modernity a powerful current of homosexual thought that flowed directly to Freud. From The Interpretation of Dreams on, Freud and psychoanalysis were engaged in a self-reflexive hermeneutic struggle with homosexual desire. While Freud repeatedly pictures the homosexual motif in his dreams, he repeatedly represses it in his interpretations. His homosexual desire is in fundamental conflict with his desire to consolidate the science of psychoanalysis. Freud's inability to interpolate his desire in the interpretive function, however, paradoxically leads to the failure to solve the case of Dora. From Dora, however, Freud learns the hysterical solution, which takes paradox into account. As Dora stands before the Dresden Madonna, Freud stands before the Mona Lisa and conceives the theory of Narcissism. Through the Narcissus trope and in "On Narcissism" Freud incorporates homosexual desire into the body of psychoanalysis and into the mind of the modern, breaking down the artificial opposition of the ego and the id that had structured psychoanalytic theory until then