Provocation as Art

Proceedings of the 2nd Ekphrasis Conference:

Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality
in Contemporary Visual Culture
- May, 5, Babeș� -Bolyai Univerșity, Cluj-Napoca

Edited by
Doru POP
ISBN 978-606-561-148-1
© Accent, 2015
Cluj-Napoca
www.accentpublisher.ro
 Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture 5

Contributors
of the Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and
Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture,
2nd Ekphrasis Conference in Cinema and Visual Culture,
- May , ”abe;-”olyai University,
The Faculty of Theatre and Television, Cluj-Napoca
teatrutv.ubbcluj.ro/conferences/provocation

“VR“M, Horea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
horea.avram@ubbcluj.ro
Horea Avram teaches at the Department of Cinema and Media, Faculty of Theatre
and Television, ”abeş-”olyai University, Cluj, Romania. Doctoral studies in “rt History
and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He researches and writes
about new media art, representation theory, technology, performance and visual
culture. His most recent publications include “ugmented Reality , Encyclopedia of
“esthetics, Oxford and New York Oxford University Press, The Visual Regime
of “ugmented Space , in Theorizing Visual Studies Writing Through the Discipline,
James Elkins ed. , New York Routledge, . He publishes essays in M/C Media and
Culture Journal, International Journal of “rts and Technology, Kinephanos, Ekphrasis,
Idea. “rt + Society, “rta, etc. Independent curator since . He has curated most
notably for Venice ”iennale in .

”ŁOTNICK“-M“ZUR, Elżbieta
Institute of “rt History
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin Poland
elamazur@kul.lublin.pl
Elżbieta Błotnicka-Mazur is Director of the Department of Modern and Contem-
porary “rt History, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She completed
her PhD in , supervised by prof. Lechosław Lameński, with the thesis ”ohdan
Kelles- Krauze - – między profesją i pasją. Życie i twórczość zapomnianego
lubelskiego architekta i malarza eng. ”ohdan Kelles-Krauze - – ”etween
Profession and Passion. Life and Work of the Forgotten Lublin “rchitect and Painter
– published as a monograph . She also published a complete catalogue of
6 Contributors

architectural projects by Kelles-Krauze . Her research interests include sculpture

and architecture of the th century. She is currently pursuing a project focusing on the
sculpture and phenomena on the sculpture’s edge in the ’s in Poland.

ENYEDI, Delia
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
delia.enyedi@ubbcluj.ro
Delia Enyedi is “ssistant Professor within the Cinema and Media Department of
the Faculty of Theatre and Television, ”abe;-”olyai University, Romania. Her main
research interests lie in the evolution of narrative structures in visual arts and in the field
of history and aesthetics of silent cinema, with a particular focus on the Transylvanian
silent film industry. She is currently revising for publication her doctoral dissertation
on Hungarian theatre and film artist Jenő Janovics.

GRECE“, Olivia
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
monica_grecea@yahoo.com
Olivia Grecea has studied Letters and Theatre Studies and Directing at ”abe;-
”olyai University in Cluj, Dortmund during a Leonardo da Vinci scholarship and
Paris during a Master’s programme at Université Paris – Sorbonne Nouvelle .
Starting with she collaborates as assistant director and director with a number
of Romanian theatres. Currently she is a freelance director and PhD researcher she is
interested in contemporary playwriting as well as devised and collaborative working
processes.

GREVEN”ROCK, Christina
University of Kiel Germany
ch.grevenbrock@gmx.de
Christina Grevenbrock is Magister “rtium in History of art and German and
Media Studies of the University of Kiel, Germany. Curator at Kunsthalle Emden,
Germany from to . Currently working on PhD Thesis on Social Relations
in the Depiction of Death in Contemporary “rt at University of Kiel. Exhibitions and
publications on international modern and contemporary art.

HOWORUS-CZ“JK“, Magdalena
University of Gdańsk Poland
m.howorus-czajka@ug.edu.pl
Magdalena Howorus-Czajka, Ph.D., is “ssistant Professor at the University of
Gdansk Poland , Faculty of Philology, Department of Cultural Studies. She has
graduated from the Catholic University of Lublin and is a member of the “ssociation
 Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture 7

for Cultural Studies. Her research interests include Polish art, especially in Gdansk,
Sopot and Gdynia Tri-city , history of Polish art press after World War II. She is the
author of the books The Permeation the Idea of Informel and the Polish Press of the
s and s, Gdansk University of Gdansk Press, and Wiktor Tołkin – The
Sculptor. The Monograph, Warsaw Neriton, .

L“CROIX, Claude
Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke Canada
clacroix@ubishops.ca
Claude Lacroix is “ssociate Professor and Chair, “rt History and Theory Program
”ishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada. Claude Lacroix earned his ”.“. Honours
in Visual “rts from the University of Ottawa, his Masters in “rt History/Fine “rts
from the Université de Montréal and his Ph.D. in “rt History and Theory from the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he held a SSHRC Doctoral
scholarship. Claude Lacroix has a broad range of teaching and research interests,
particularly on modern and contemporary art. His recent research examines how
diverse representations of the human body in the visual arts cross borders between a
real and an imaginary identity, especially when they deviate from artistic norms.

N“E, “ndrei
University of Bucharest Romania
andrei_nae@yahoo.de
Andrei Nae holds a ”“ English and German from University of ”ucharest and a
M“ in ”ritish Cultural Studies after an Erasmus Fellowship at Salzburg University. He
is currently a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Literary Studies, University of
”ucharest.

P“VEL, Laura
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
laura.pavel@ubbcluj.ro
Laura Pavel is literary essayist and drama theory scholar, Professor at the Faculty
of Theatre and Television of ”abeş-”olyai University, where she teaches theatre history
and anthropology of performance. Since , she is the Director of the PhD Program
in Theatre Studies at the ”abeş-”olyai University. She is the author, among other
publications, of Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of “lternative Literature, translated
by “listair Ian ”lyth, Champaign & Dublin & London, Dalkey “rchive Press, and
of Theatre and Identity. Interpretations on the Inner Stage Cluj, . She co-authored
several collective volumes. Her monographical essay Ionesco. “nti-lumea unui sceptic
[Ionesco. The “nti-World of a Skeptic], , translated into Italian by Maria Luisa
Lombardo, is to be published by “racne Editrice, Rome, in .
8 Contributors

POEN“R, Horea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
horea.poenar@ubbcluj.ro
Horea Poenar is “ssociate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, ”abeş-”olyai Univer-
sity, Cluj-Napoca. He teaches courses on Literary and Cultural Theory, “esthetics,
Ethics of Community, Ethics of Images and The History of the Novel. He has published
extensively on these topics and other related subjects in various publications. His
doctoral thesis is a study on the concepts of phenomenological aesthetics. He was the
director of Echinox cultural journal between and . Since , he is the host of
cultural TV programs on the Romanian National Television.

POP, Doru
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
doru.pop@ubbcluj.ro
Doru Pop is professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Television, ”abeş-”olyai
University in Cluj in Romania, where he researches visual culture, cinema and media
studies. He has an M“ in journalism and mass communication from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a PhD in the philosophy of visual culture from
”abe;-”olyai University. In he was a Fulbright fellow at ”ard College, New York,
where he taught a course on the Romanian recent cinema. He is the editor in chief of the
Ekphrasis academic journal. His most recent book is Romanian New Wave Cinema “n
Introduction McFarland & Company, .

URS“, Mihaela
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Romania
mihaela.ursa@ubbcluj.ro
Mihaela Ursa is “ssociate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, ”abeş-”olyai
University, Head of the Comparative Literature Department. She teaches comparative
literature and authored seven books in Romanian language on comparatism, critical
theory, fictionality, gender studies, and erotic literature. Co-author of several collective
volumes, with more than articles, studies, reviews, essays published on cultural
studies, literary theory and criticism. Most recent research stages in Caen, Rome,
”ard College New York . She was awarded prizes for her books by The Romanian
“ssociation of Comparative Literature and The Romanian “ssociation of Writers.
Member in peer review boards Caietele Echinox, Philobiblon, Ekphrasis - Cluj .

VIRGINÁS, “ndrea
Sapientia Hungarian University, Cluj Romania
avirginas@gmail.com
Andrea Virginás is lecturer at the Dept. of Film, Photography, and Media, Sapientia
Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania http //film.sapientia.
 Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture 9

ro/en/staff/dr-andrea-virginas , where she teaches film history classical Hollywood

and contemporary mainstream cinema and introduction to communication and film
theory. Research interests film genres, postcommunist cinema, feminist film/ cultural
theory, analog and digital media theory. - postdoctoral research project
The Role of Generic Panels in European Small Cinemas PN-II-RU-PD- - - ,
UEFISCDI / The Romanian Ministry of Education .
10 Contributors
Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture 11

Contents

Doru POP
Introduction: From Art as Provocation to Provocation as Art

Claude L“CROIX
Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ,
Christian Conservatives Protests and Court Actions

Laura P“VEL
Beyond Artistic Aura – Visuality and Aesthetic Ideology

Elżbieta ”ŁOTNICK“-M“ZUR
51 Ritual – Provocation – Dialogue.
Aspects of Nudity in the Art of Jerzy Bereś

Magdalena HOWORUS-CZ“JK“
Incorporating the Viewer into the Picture/Incorporating the Picture
into New Media the Art of Dominik Lejman

Horea “VR“M
81 Stelarc After Van Gogh. Body in Excess and A Happy New Ear

Olivia GRECE“
89 The Provocative Thoughtfulness of Christoph Schlingensief

Christina GREVEN”ROCK
Teresa Margolles’ En el aire –
Death, provocation and social responsibility

Horea POEN“R
112 Art’s War. Figures on the Threshold
12 Contributors

“ndrea VIRGINÁS
The “burden of the real” in Eastern European and Scandinavian
genre ilms: knitwear, dancing bodies, and endoscopy

“ndrei N“E
Representations of the Monstrous Feminine in the F.E.A.R. Trilogy

Delia ENYEDI
Clothing for Nudity: Sexual Practices as Discourse
in Contemporary Fashion Advertising

Mihaela URS“
Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia
154 Mihaela URSA

Mihaela URS“

Challenges of Teaching Love Studies.

Scandal in the Academia

Abstract. The paper describes a few challenges of introducing love studies for Romanian undergraduate
and graduate students of arts and letters, at the crossroads of comparative literature and cultural
studies. It presents the results of a qualitative research initiated in 2002, when, although courses in
feminism and women studies were already functioning in all the main East-European universities, love
studies had no academic place. The subject of love was often regarded, by some of the feminists,
as anachronistic remains of a patriarchal way of thinking, or love studies were reduced to incidental
explorations of some erotic themes and motifs. There was also a certain institutional embarrassment
of mixing academia and erotica. This study examines the need for love studies in connection to cultural
and social praxes, gender determination and formal artistic upgrading. Also, some fallacies of traditional
aesthetic teaching are explored and exposed in the preamble of our own methodological proposition.
Keywords: love studies, erotology, self-representation, cultural studies, cognitive ictions, love codes,
violence as love.

Forging a new discipline or working in-between?

“fter the fall of most communist regimes during - , East-European ac-
ademia had to catch-up in diferent areas. This way, some approximations of cul-
tural studies and gender studies appeared as new subjects of study. In the ear-
ly nineties, neither gender studies programs, nor even cultural studies had any
curricular space inside the quite conservative university programs and were re-
garded as a somehow exotic, if not suspicious form of academic work. In this con-
text, two main paths seemed to open for topics related to women studies, cultur-
al studies, or feminist philosophy one was developed inside faculties of philos-
ophy and history, the other inside faculties of leters, mainly in English and in
comparative literature departments. ”y , although courses in feminism and
women studies were already functioning in all the main East-European universi-
ties inside English departments, philosophy departments or as programs of com-
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 155

parative literature, love studies had no academic place. The exclusion was part-
ly due to the fact that the subject of love was often regarded, by some of the fem-
inists, as anachronistic remains of a patriarchal way of thinking, and partly be-
cause love studies were rather reduced to an incidental exploration of some erot-
ic themes and motifs.
However, after , university boards were more likely to give their profes-
sors greater freedom regarding the choice of their subject mater, as long as it
illed the requested position as a comparative literature course or as a philosophy
course or as a visual hermeneutics course, etc. within the curricula. Taking ad-
vantage of this new gained liberty to choose what one should teach, some profes-
sors migrated, inside traditional disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, histo-
ry of literature, etc., towards frontier ields and topics that one could relate today
to gender studies and to love studies hermeneutics of love including expressive
codes and their interpretation feminist deconstructions of traditional clichés such
as l’Eternel feminin, natural femininity, etc. feminist readings of representations of
love in literature, ilm, iction analyses of writen communication as means of con-
structing love.
“ lot was happening in the world of higher education in terms of restructuring,
rewriting, deconstructing. “ lot was happening in the social, day-by-day world,
too. While during the communist regime all representations of a less-than-perfect
life were censored, Romanian public life of the nineties was looded with reports
of scandals, corruption, social violence, domestic cruelty, and sexual abuse. These
were not only present in real life and on the news, but made their way to cinema
production Pop - and to literary and artistic creation.
”y - , things seemed to get setled in their paths. However, a European
Commission Report, Domestic Violence against Women. Special Eurobarometer
of , showed that more than % of the Romanians believed domestic vio-
lence was very common in their country. When asked about the reasons of violence
against women, in Greece, % of respondents said that violence against women
was unacceptable and should always be punishable by law, followed by Cyprus
% and Lithuania % . However, only % of people in Latvia thought that
violence against women was unacceptable and should always be punishable by
law, followed by % in Romania . To make things worse, % of all Romanians
still believe violence against women to be acceptable in all circumstances and % -
acceptable in certain circumstances.
No further proof was needed that Romanians as a whole had a debatable ati-
tude towards the question of violence and that this atitude was apparent at ev-
ery level of social and cultural life, to mention just these. Particularly, this intricate
bond between domestic life and violence perpetuated not only the idea that vio-
lence is acceptable, but – even more – that one needed some violence in order to
156 Mihaela URSA

get some afection and love. What was – in this respect – the place of higher edu-
cation in humanities? Was there a role to be played at a social level, when the gen-
eral academic trend was still conservative, inclined towards an autarchic approach
of literature through the Great ”ooks? Was there an ethical point to be made start-
ing from the literary approach of the intricate politics of the body and their efects?
My turn to love studies was a mater of answering these questions as a professor
of literature, trying to understand and ight at least some of the causes of this gen-
eralization of violent conduct. More than that, I had to respond to my students’
growing feeling of social uselessness of their academic studies on purely literary
subjects.

A new subject of study

“ irst obstacle was given by the fact that, dealing with a frontier subject in ed-
ucation, I was in need of scientiic and systematic deinitions, approaches, meth-
ods of study. In a sense, love is privileged by its conceptual instability, but how
can one aim to scientiically research an instable topic? From a certain point of
view, love becomes so universal a theme because of the remarkable variety of its
worlds ”ayley . In other words, the more particular conigurations love gets,
the more universal it is considered. In sociology, the diversity of representations
of love is seen as a result of the fact that, although rationally speaking a particu-
lar problem will be solved in a similar way by a large number of people, love is of-
fered irrational and diferent solutions or explanations Luhmann . In want of
a scientiic discourse that could be generalized to the extent of a deinition, the sub-
ject of love ofers itself to conigurations just as atractive as they are varied. Love
is a generous subject particularly due to this conigurative variety and the impos-
sibility to assign it a single deinition to be put at the basis of a single discipline.
While I was dealing with these dilemmas, as well as discussing the subject of
love rather intuitively, than scientiically, I edited one volume entitled Divanul sc-
riitoarei [Women Writers’ Salon] . It was an efort of deining the writer’s
identity in terms of gender. Interviewing more than a dozen of the most prom-
inent Romanian women writers, I aimed at deining a possibly common set of
themes, style marks and gender codes within their writing, as well as taking the
pulse of gender airmation in their intimate, social and public conducts. The re-
sult was extremely revealing it showed an identity crisis in these writers’ self-af-
irmation as gendered creators. Many of them enjoyed the idea that a creator bears
no signiicant gender marks and, being reluctant to feminism and any other form
of group activism, were certain that their literature did not have feminine traits.
However, when asked about their theme of predilection, they admited to an al-
most general inclination towards subjects from the emotional sphere intimate
love, self-love, motherly love, emotional intelligence, etc. .
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 157

On the other hand, quite a few of them confessed they viewed themselves as
lonely heroes in the world of men which they extended to the world of literary
work , gaining their place through fair batle. This self-image of the woman writer
as a guerilla ighter is but the confessive correspondent of one of the most popular
metaphors of romantic love – the batle of the sexes, the erotic war. The fact that it
igures so prominently in the confessions of these women writers makes me think
that Romanian culture, as other cultures of Eastern Europe, may be partly respon-
sible for what is happening at a social level.
“ literature writen by women who believe that love and artistic creation are
ields of batle may be the result of a violent cultural climate, but – to some extent
– it can also be its unwilling supporter.
”y , I had used in my classes of comparative literature a series of question-
naires on gender issues, to be answered by my students two times irst, at the be-
ginning of the course, than, at the very end. This evaluation helped me see wheth-
er the questioning of such issues how comfortable are you in your own gender
identity, how do you relate to society-assigned roles for your gender, what design
of love suits you best, etc. during the course had helped them beter understand
themselves. It has become clear to me, for a number of years between and the
present, that my students gained a beter grasp of the extent of problems like gen-
der discrimination, inequities in the dialectics of social efort versus social reward,
intimate manipulation and abuse. “lso, they were now able to identify formerly
homogeneous representations of love as diferent images, metaphors, ideologies
referring to various and nuanced contents such as intimate love, erotic war, uni-
versal love, transcendental elevation, desire or lust. Their answers, regarding per-
ception of self-identity, of their role in society, but also in their families and circles
of friends, their reactions to literary texts and to visual representations have con-
vinced me that I needed a hybrid, composite methodology, coiled of gender stud-
ies, psychoanalysis, visual analysis, critical thinking, and some criticism of ideol-
ogies, narratology, text analysis, sociology and anthropology. I was in need of an
interdisciplinary approach to love.
While teaching a comparative literature course on erotic literature to second
and third year students in Leters who were majoring in two diferent languages
and literatures , I encouraged them to explain their preference for modern texts.
“lmost unanimously, their preference had to do with a shared sensation that we
do not love today like they did in their times . That being said, I realized that the
thing in question was the very content of the notion of love, and not only some
outdated style or ictional construction. Ever since the observation, the focus of
the course shifted considerably to the deinition of the kind of love that was active
and functional in a given text, artifact or social construction, regardless whether
that deinition was exposed in a declarative manner or only implicit in a behav-
158 Mihaela URSA

ior, psychological reaction, individual or community belief, etc. While accepting

the fact that the notion of love takes a variety of forms, my students – who were
given reading assignments from a large amount of texts dealing with love iction,
poetry, religious texts, mythology, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis,
news, advertising – seemed reluctant when I asked them to give up the idea that
one can verify whether a certain form of love is true or not! “bandoning my initial
project of contending that there was no true or false in love, given the luidity
of the concept in the irst place, I was forced to admit that – as readers and think-
ers, but also as social and individual beings – they had to be given the opportuni-
ty of seeing love in terms of truth. “ctually, this was the methodological key I was
looking for, in order to create a formal interdisciplinary tool for love studies.
One of my irst conclusions was that there is a paradoxical relationship be-
tween truth and lie that grounds any form of love iction. The love iction phrase
must be read conceptually, as referring to any form of ictional project on the sub-
ject of love, in order to escape the somewhat conventional and deprecated limits of
love literature . It does not refer to a particular literary genre, but much rather to
a certain type of imaginative format, to be found in literature, representational art,
theoretical discourse, social and political praxis.

How to research the undeinable

In another book devoted to love studies Eroticon. Tratat despre icțiunea amoroasă
[Erotikon. “ treatise on “morous Fiction] , I have proposed a typology that
I successfully use in my teaching practice with students of comparative literature.
Love ictions always present, implicitly or explicitly, an erotology, that is, a pseu-
do-explanation, a pseudo-theory, or even an ideology of love, a code of identiica-
tion of true love or the nature of love. I have used the term erotology to deine
an alternative philosophy of love, in order to explain and study a ictional world
guided by its truth about love i.e. the idea that love is a mater of androgyny or
that it is a fatal atraction or that it is a creative power or that it is a sexual illness
or metaphysics – a proposition such as these becomes the absolute law of a certain
iction. Love ictions are not concerned with the strong truth or even with the
verisimilar possibility, but with a concept of truth deined by theorists of cognitive
ictionalism as a frame of reference.
Therefore, it would be beneicial for theorists and researchers in the ield of
love studies to take into account a notion of truth understood as a useful iction,
in the sense that Hans Vaihinger lends to iction in his The Philosophy of “s If
. I have generalized his understanding of a iction as a speciic logical prod-
uct, a useful instrument for inding our way more easily in this world , a mental
structure distinct from a hypothesis which is demonstrable . “ iction cannot be
theoretically validated, although it proves useful in ictionally solving impos-
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 159

sible problems . With the help of iction thus understood, epistemological sys-
tems can treat impossible terms as self-evident, using them in subsequent prax-
es e.g., the deinition of the atom as a iction makes possible the practical dis-
course of mechanical physics, the theory of relativity, etc. . “ lover chooses to be-
lieve that he was torn away from his love at the beginnings of the world, when
they both were part of a perfect being, because this lie has truth value for him
and for his understanding of love as such a deliberately false supposition , as
Vaihinger calls it .
Once one admits that any object of love studies is a cultural object, even when
research involves data taken from genetics, neurobiology, medicine or psycholo-
gy, some sort of product of a given culture at a given time, one can see the use-
fulness of the concepts of cognitive ictionalism in the construction of the new re-
search frontier that is love studies.
The useful iction of an erotology can be seen as the snapshot that freezes the
turmoil of an entire amorous world. Its validity should not be underestimated.
While it is true that some erotologies only function for a limited number of objects,
others have an incredible cultural and social authority not only do they formulate
a philosophy or a theory of love, but also they inluence or even format love con-
structions according to their own design, explaining, in their particular logic, en-
tire deposits of representations and artistic conigurations.
From here, I started a typology of possible deinitions of love as diferent forms
of truth-discourses. Many of my students’ answers were approving the idea that
love is not as much a form of partnership as it is a form of war. Seduction, they
said, means ighting a batle which is commonly named falling in love, and this
brought up the question of power, violence, and submission. This idea conirmed
some data from the quoted European commission report. “mong the ive poten-
tial types of violence under consideration, sexual and physical violence are seen as
the most serious across the EU, with % of respondents considering these forms
of violence to be very serious. However, to some of them, sexual violence is only
fairly serious, as opposed to very serious Lithuania % , Latvia % , Poland
% , Slovenia % , Romania % , Estonia % , Hungary % . “s far as
physical violence is concerned, in Latvia, only % see this issue as a very serious
one, with % considering it to be fairly serious this is followed by Lithuania %
very serious , Estonia % , Poland % and Romania % . Psychological vi-
olence reveals the widest variations, only % of respondents in Estonia view this
very seriously, as do % in Latvia and % in Romania - . For obvious rea-
sons, following the interpretation of this type of data, we had to explore the par-
ticular form of the well-known association of sex and violence in some of the most
relevant literary and cultural representations.
Other students had, however, more romantic designations in mind the prima-
ry explanation for love, these said, was the atraction one feels at irst sight, as un-
160 Mihaela URSA

conditional as any disease, even though they were contradicted by those believing
that, on the contrary, one cannot love someone they don’t really know, maybe as
a previous best friend. Finally, a third type of answers was more inclined to phi-
losophy and universal values. Some students maintained that there was a perfect
match for everyone, from the beginning of times, and also that love alone can con-
quer mortality, sufering, and ugliness of the world, opening towards otherness in
a communitarian sense.
Taking their answers to literature, where one or the other was true for a cer-
tain ictional world, I have managed to devise a typology that helped my students
to consider that what each of them believed about love was not necessarily valid
for all cases and to accept that conceptual tolerance was needed.

Types of truth assertions in love studies

. Love is seduction, a game of power.
The interest of the seducer of Seville from the play of Tirso de Molina, which
presented Don Juan to the world is only accidentally directed towards wom-
en. His goal is the great rebellion against a father, a husband and against God.
Usurping the right of the irst night or the so-called ius primae noctis, delower-
ing virgins right before their wedding, he uses women as means to an end Don
Juan’s supremacy over father, the king and God. “lso, when the Latin poet Ovid
writes his Ars amatoria The “rt of Love , providing men with tools for gaining
and keeping love, he establishes strategies of conquest, legitimizes rape as a suit-
able erotic encounter and sees women as “mazons who must be subdued, as
poisonous snakes that must be tamed. When taming Catarina, in Shakespeare’s
comedy, Petrucchio does not have love in mind, but his power and her submis-
sion. Classic examples of seduction in iction are also classic examples of strate-
gies of conquest and submission. This erotic design is considered appealing by art-
ists of all ages because it disguises conlict as sex and, as such, gives the illusion of
power.
. Love is a curse, a place for the damned.
“ relevant understanding of love as violence is Emily ”ronte’s Wuthering
Heights. The literary themes of Gothic predestination and of a condemned love
are developed here outside the frame of an explicit social obstacle like the one in
Romeo and Juliet, for instance . Catherine and Heathclif act according to their own
mind and spirit, so they would have no problem going against social restrictions.
Wuthering Heights is about the design of a special spiritual family , whose mem-
bers have eyes like black litle devils or like devil’s messengers . The focus is
somewhere else, respectively in the telling of human initude. Happiness and the
sense of personal fulilment deeply upset the lovers and frustrate them.
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 161

“ theoretic form of the same idea appears in an eccentric volume by Georges

”ataille, Erotism, where violence is considered a necessary condition for healing the
innate rupture between all individuals and the consequent vertigo. ”y ”ataille’s
standards, the violence and death that Heathclif and Catherine inlict upon each
other is the sole guarantee of immortality. Profoundly contradictory and anti-hu-
manistic, this theory pretends that true love comes from the land of the damned, if
not the dead. It links sex, violence and death in a knot too frequently exploited by
modernity, and popular culture, whether at the level of cultural or artistic creation
see also Gediman or at the level of social life.
. There is no love, only lust.
During the last and the present centuries, love iction massively uses eroto-
graphic representations sexual boundaries explode alternative sexual practices
enter mainstream literature, the former diversity of the erotologies decreases dra-
matically. “rguably, love iction becomes, at the turn of the th century, almost
exclusively a iction of pleasure and desire. Some variations still exist violence is
sometimes understood in terms of pleasure, as a rebellion of the individual against
the communal, to the detriment of experiencing love on more than one level. Lust
is paraded as a post-humanistic success of the same individual over an obsolete
ethical system, although the hyperinvestment in sexuality is in many ways a „cov-
er story for confusion about where to place love in all the tempest of sex ”lum
. In compensation, there is a rich exhibition of discursive expressions of plea-
sure, unprecedented in the West dissecting microscopic feelings, activating phys-
iological centers of hedonist life that had been invisible.
More recently, one can notice a major change in the direction of an appar-
ent depletion of the potentially ininite desire, a possible bankruptcy of Eros
”ruckner - . Contemporary erotology seems to have exhausted desire it-
self. The erotic body appears numb from all the experiences of pleasure it had so
far it is now a post-coital body that can no longer recover its libido, guided by a
physiology of disgust, or by grotesque interaction. The relatively recent rupture
in the relationship of desire and sexuality has been explained more than once as a
consequence of the new involvement of desire in material acquisition, in a culture
that demands instant enjoyment Gorton - . Means are turned into purposes
characters are anesthetized by sexual overexcitement. The picaresque hedonism
of Charles ”ukowski in Women , the sensitive violence in Evil Angels, by Pascal
”ruckner which has connections to ”ataille’s sadistic erotics , but also the cynical
and sexual eccentricities of Frédéric ”eigbeder are only a few possibilities for illus-
trating these new erotologies of pleasure.
. Love is passion in the etymological sense of the word, i.e. suffering.
“mour-passion, passionate love in its etymological meaning, was deined by
Denis de Rougemont in his famous Love in the Western World. The term irst ap-
162 Mihaela URSA

pears in Stendhal’s On Love, but de Rougemont deines it as a form of love that

feeds on obstacles and sufering. Its purpose is related to death, which is seen as
the ultimate fulillment, the absolute merging of the loving identities in a same es-
sence. In the same book, de Rougemont deines agapé, a type of universal, active
love, based on a unional model, in which the loving identities are preserved as
such and are involved in the active project of mutual giving. This design is meant
to compensate for the fact that love and marriage were distinct maters until late
in the history of Europe, the later being more of an economic transaction, a social
and political exchange. The dialectics of eros vs. agapé is still much invoked in re-
ligious pro-marriage stands, favoring the agapic design of a couple engaged in a
mutually building efort.
. Love is the result of psychological mechanisms, a form of wishful thinking.
“nna Karenina, Tolstoy’s novel, published serially between and , il-
lustrates the psychologist code that resides at the heart of many modern erotolo-
gies. The description of inner feelings beneits from the complicity of the reader. “
real life supporter of moral love, leading to Christian marriage, Tolstoy choos-
es a diferent path for this great novel. In his Confession, he explicitly states that his
work was met with scorn and criticism as long as it represented moral good, but it
was encouraged and praised once it represented ignoble desires. The theme of an
adulterous love uses here a literary motif that was frequent in the th century the
love afair between a young man and a married woman, a late development of the
relationship between knight and lady of the castle. On the one hand, this motif of-
fers the opportunity to develop the forbidden love theme, but on the other hand, it
shows a social reality which Tolstoy deplores in his memoirs, when he evokes an
aunt who recommended him in his youth to have an afair with a married woman,
because there was nothing beter suited to prepare a young man for life . Tolstoy
believes love is not only what one feels while being in love, but also the perception
about love of both those living it and those judging the couple. The irst draft of a
similar concept can be found under the name of crystallization , in Stendhal’s Of
Love. The metaphor of a modest, unatractive twig, which salt turns into a jewel, is
meant to create an analogy with the psychological processes of self-projection in-
volved in love.
. Love is magnetic attraction, if not a disease.
The phenomenon of magnetism must have had a special fascination to the
Renaissance Europe, as long as it was used to explain phenomena as varied as
heroism magnetism from heroes of the “ntiquity, resulting in heroic mania , po-
etry magnetization of the poet by his muse , the eros spiritual magnetization of
blood resulting in erotic mania , or the modelling of virtues magnetic inluence of
the virtuous . The magnetic theory of love takes shape from the philosophy of old
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 163

“rabic medicine, brought to Europe during the “rab Conquest. “ further devel-
opment of this deinition goes to deine love as an illness, a disease of both body
and mind. During the last decades, this possibility has been reconirmed as a med-
ical certainty in psyche-somatic approaches of well-being, or in the scientiic dis-
course of today neuropsychology or neurobiology. The tableau of literary illustra-
tions of the particular erotology formulated by love as an illness continues well
into modernity see Goethe’s early novel The Suferings of Young Werther, Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice or Gabriel Garçia Marquez’s Love in Times of Cholera). This
format does not function outside the heterosexual frame, where magnetic love is
presumed a technical impossibility by authors advocating it on the basis of a mas-
culine-feminine polarity and complementarity on a homoerotic reconiguration
of former dichotomic understandings of love, see Kopelson . In spite of this, mag-
netic love is very much present in both visual and literary representations, and has
been borrowed as such by popular culture.
. Love is the attraction of the two halves of the perfect being of the first “ndrogynous.
“lthough it comes from an Oriental myth, this idea was made famous by
Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue which makes two very diferent assertions when
it comes to deining love in relationship to absolute ”eauty. These are androgy-
nous love and, respectively, Platonic love. Of the two, androgynous love seems to
be the most widely known, concentrating readers’ atention with magnetic force,
while the determinant details of the ascensional, Platonic love – the one model
meant to center the dialogue - are remembered with less precision and more dif-
iculties. “ristophanes’ intervention contains the retelling of the “ndrogynous
myth, a Platonic irony both at “ristophanes’ expense and at the religious reading
of myths. The tragic story of people who have been in perpetual search for each
other, since their separation from an original unit, is to “ristophanes, the Platonic
narrator, the history of a hilarious-grotesque anthropogenesis, even if a more com-
mon understanding makes it a metaphysical story of transcendental, irrepressible
love.
. Love is the aspiration to absolute ”eauty of two manly souls.
The center of the Symposium is the Platonic theory of love. “lthough told by
Socrates – who pretends to remember and reproduce the learnings of Diotima, „a
woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge d , this particular
theory belongs, as commentators say, to Plato himself and its narrative treatment
is completely diferent. The entire demonstration is nothing more but an erotic av-
atar of Plato’s theory of absolute Ideas, because Eros becomes here a wish for ab-
solute beauty, good and truth. “ common fallacy turned Platonic love, in popular
understanding, into a form of love void of all sexual content. However, in Plato’s
text, one proceeds from learning the beauty of the body, only to end with abso-
164 Mihaela URSA

lute, ideal ”eauty. Even more, according to the same source, Platonic love deines
the masculine homoeroticism love between women is seen by Plato as vulgar and
purely sexual, while love between woman and man is a mater of procreation, not
of spiritual creation and immortality.
One should note the resistance of the androgynous project as a justiication for
love, as „the truth at the basis of numerous creations. “lthough favored by Plato,
the explanation of Platonic love is much less used in art and literature of the few
examples, maybe the best is still Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice .

A few conclusions
The frames of reference described above as erotologies do not constitute a com-
plete list, but a selection of the most famous ones. They are identiiable by means of
mainly two classes of textual identiiers content-speciic ones and discourse-spe-
ciic ones. The irst class is comprised of what „happens in a certain iction, or of
what a certain love-project immediately „says . Characters’ body-language, red-
ness, temperature, staring – all these are part of diferent codes of love, recognized
as such by a majority of receptors, for statistic reasons. The second class refers to
both composition or structure and to discursive praxes that are active in a certain
iction. This second level allows the literary and cultural researcher to identify a
set of speciic scenes of the erotic scenarios the window-scene, the balcony-scene,
the theatre-in-theatre frame, etc. and a set of declarative statements in which love
is rationalized either as feeling, emotion, psychological action or even patological
sufering.
My purpose was not to compose another scholarly discourse, but to see wheth-
er, by analysis of these clichés on love, by dismantling them with my students
in interdisciplinary analyses which did not only involve literary texts, but their
own testimonies, non-iction, ilm or advertising, I could make a change in their
gender airmation. “ most striking aspect was the recurrent intervention of con-
lict and violence at the very heart of many an erotology, but also at the heart of
my students’ interpretations. Students of both sexes have been confessing feeling
trapped in a violent climate, not only at a physical and psychological level, but on
social and political levels as well. Some have been confessing feeling tired to man-
age their lives in a way that would not allow violence. “s shown before, their per-
ception corresponds to statistical data on violence.
On the other hand, when exploring texts that were part of sacred literature i.e.
Song of Solomon , as erotic conigurations of sensuality, more than one student pro-
tested against the overlapping of religion and literature, unable to distinguish be-
tween their own religious stand and their own critical-thinking stand and, more
surprising in a secular education such as ours, unable to read the respective texts
as literature alone. This is why, in spite of the very good response I had from most
 Challenges of Teaching Love Studies. Scandal in the Academia 165

of them, I have dropped texts that were problematic in this sense. Some lectures
on pornography were also replaced by lectures on other topics, due to ethical re-
luctance from less than % of my students to critically and aesthetically decon-
struct pornography in art and literature, in spite of the fact that the approach was
based on the philosophy of nature of the th century, on the Sadeian rooting of
the erotic aesthetics of “pollinaire, ”ataille, etc. This is where I was forced to ad-
mit that my students were more conservative than I expected when asked to trans-
fer their otherwise daily observations into an academic, scientiic and critical dis-
course. This is also where I intend to extend my research in order to ind beter
clues of opening these dilemmas that function as academic taboos at the moment,
even if – oddly enough – they touch religion and obscenity, usually understood as
the opposing limits of the large spectrum of love expressions.
One can only hope that nuanced, interdisciplinary approaches in love studies
could help create a new form of social conduct, emulate beneicial social praxes,
which would raise awareness towards the issues of violent relations between sex-
es and would increase tolerance towards individual options of love life. The rele-
vance of problematizations of love and the intimate domain goes well beyond the
intimate sphere, allowing insights into justiications for gender discrimination or
even sexual violence. Relationships in this sphere afect hierarchies and valuations
in public ields, as well. Promoted today as a form of comparative cultural stud-
ies, comparative literature can refute allegations of uselessness of the humanities
by promoting love studies. “s I see this inter discipline, it would have the role
of an interface between popular culture and critical analysis, between a socially
problematic cultural ground and the academia. Students who are literate in love
studies are beter prepared to understand the relation to any type of otherness in
non-belligerent terms and to reform previously conlictual frames of thought.

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