Edited by

Koen De Temmerman
 The Erotic:

Exploring Critical Issues

Edited by

Koen De Temmerman

Selected papers from the inaugural inter-disciplinary global conference

held in Budapest, 13-15 May 2004

Oxford, United Kingdom

 Dr Robert Fisher
Series Editor

Advisory Board

Dr Margaret Sönser Breen Professor John Parry

Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr David Seth Preston
Professor M ichael Goodman Professor Peter Twohig
Dr Jones Irwin Professor S Ram Vemuri
Professor Asa Kasher Professor Bernie W arren
Revd Stephen Morris Revd Dr Kenneth W ilson, O.B.E

Volume 5
A volume in the Critical Issues project
‘The Erotic’
First published 2005 by the Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval systrem,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN: 1-904710-04-2
 Contents

Introduction vii

Twelve contributions: abstracts and keywords ix

PART I Philosophical Approaches Towards the Erotic

Eros thanatos in Benjamin's Goethe’s Elective Affinities 1

Brendan Moran

Eros and War, Eros and Betrayal, Eros and Thanatos: Forces Leading to a Cosmic Whole 7
Peggy Manouka

Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self 11
John Augusten Nijjem

PART II The Erotic and Psychoanalysis 21

Differential Mechanisms: Form, Matter and Sado-masochism 23

Chris L. Smith

Dr. Love And Mr. Death 31

Andrew Feldmár

PART III The Erotic in Language 35

Comparative or Intensifying Words 37

Alphonso Lingis

Metaphors, the erotic & survival or How I learned to use a tool of repressive normalization as 47
an instrument of eroto-sexual revolution
Jennifer M. Collins

The Erotic and the Pornographic: an Interdisciplinary Perspective 53

Katarzyna Wieckowska and Przemyslaw Zywiczynski

PART IV The Erotic in Literature 57

Deleuze in Waiting 59
Lorraine Markotic

Erotic Rhetoric. The Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel 63

Koen De Temmerman

PART V The Erotic in Visual Art and Film 71

The erotic concept of “feminine” in Russian cultural tradition: between Orthodoxy and Socialism 73
Marina Novikova

Carnal (Un)knowing: the Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period film 79
Olivia Macassey

Notes on Contributors 85
 Introduction

This e-book is the result of a three day international conference, entitled “The Erotic: Exploring Critical
Issues” and held in Budapest (13-15 May 2004). Its organizers were dr. Rob Fisher (Inter-Disciplinary.Net) and
dr. Jones Irwin (St.-Patrick’s College, Dublin, Ireland).

This conference marked the launch of a new inter- and multidisciplinary project, which comprises an
annual conference and research and publication series, and which aims at exploring the challenging and
paradoxical nature of the ‘erotic’ and assessing the reasons for and complications arising out of its resurgence of
status and attention. The starting point upon which the conference organizers drew, was the observation that
study of the erotic has become increasingly specialised within disciplinary boundaries with the twin effect of
failing to recognize cross-disciplinary connections which centre on this theme and neglecting important
historical and cultural perspectives on the development of the ‘erotic’ as a locus of attention. Thus, the
conference in Budapest was a first step towards instigating interdisciplinary dialogues which might enable a
clearer awareness of the historical and cultural developments of the 'erotic', and exploring cross-disciplinary
perspectives on its current forms and manifestations. As follow-up, a second global conference on the ‘erotic’
will take place in Budapest in May 2005.

The aim of this reader is less ambitious than the overall aim of the two project developers. Being a first
palpable result of the above-mentioned interdisciplinary approach towards the concept of the ‘erotic’, this e-book
does not pretend to be anything more than a historical snap shot of some (selected) work that was presented in
Budapest by scholars of the most varying academic backgrounds. This aim affects the overall design of the e-
book in two ways: firstly, the contributions included in this volume have undergone only minor adjustments
since their presentation in Budapest. Soon, however, this e-book will have its hard volume counterpart, which
will be edited by Jones Irwin and will offer many (if not all) papers presented at the Budapest conference in an
extended and (possibly) thoroughly reworked form.

Secondly, this reader provides a broad and varied image of the different approaches, adopted
throughout the conference, towards the concept of the ‘erotic’ and renounces from offering a cohesive or
systematic theory of it. Accordingly, none of the five parts of which this reader consists, claims to offer an
exhaustive or systematic overview of its specific area. They rather provide an anthology of concrete ways of
tackling (a certain aspect related to) the erotic within a specific approach.

In Part I, I included the contributions which adopt a philosophical approach of the erotic. In his
contribution on the concept of Eros in Walter Benjamin’s Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, Brendan Moran
examines Benjamin’s association of Eros with Neigung (“inclination”) with regard to the functioning of death in
Eros (Eros thanatos). “Eros thanatos” is also the main theme of Peggy Manouka’s contribution. She examines
the existence, the fusion and the manifestation of eros and thanatos as a cosmic pair by tackling the pairs “Eros
and War” and “Eros and Betrayal”. Finally, John Nijjem draws upon Plato, Heidegger and Gadamer to present
an epistemological approach of the concept of the erotic, which is defined as the fusion of the notions of eros
(lack and desire) and erotesis (quest(ion)ing and orientation).

Part II situates some aspects of the concept of the erotic within psychoanalysis. Drawing upon two
critiques (a critique of hylomorphism [Simondon, Deleuze, Guattari] and a critique of the psychoanalytic
interpretation of sadomasochism [Deleuze] ), Chris Smith’s paper illuminates body construct by linking the
conceptual persona (Deleuze & Guattari) to the body of the masochist. Andrew Feldmar, in turn, explores some
implications of the thin psychoanalytic borderline between sexual desire and separation anxiety.

In Part III, three contributions focus on different manifestations of the erotic in our usage of language.
Alphonso Lingis, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, focusses on the relative and absolute use of
erotically oriented value terms. Whereas relative use implies that these terms are used comparatively (to classify
and rank), absolute use primarily implies the intensification of inner states, outside any comparison. Jennifer
Collins draws upon the well known basic notion that metaphors are tools to shape experience (Lakoff & Johnson
1980), to illustrate the presence and importance of metaphor in discourse of incest survivors. In order to tackle
the place of the pornographic in the production of culture, Katarzyna Wieckowska and Przemyslaw Zywiczynski
locate the term ‘pornographic’ semantically in relation to the term ‘erotic’ and examine the transgressional
character of pornography drawing upon discourse analysis in pornographic films.
viii Introduction

Part IV provides two contributions, both dealing with the construction of certain aspects of the erotic in
literature. In her contribution entitled “Deleuze in Waiting”, Lorraine Markotic argues for the relevance of Gilles
Deleuze’s theory of masochism to Ha Jin’s novel Waiting. Furthermore, she claims that the novel can be
understood to indicate a problematic aspect of masochism’s exclusivity in Deleuze’s theory. As a classical
scholar, I deal in my own contribution with some characteristics of the erotic in an ancient literary genre known
as the ancient Greek novel. In one of these stories about love and adventure, I highlight direct speech of the
protagonists as one aspect in the rhetorical construction of so-called ‘sexual symmetry’.

Part V, finally, deals with the representation of the erotic in visual arts (Marina Novikova) and film
(Olivia Macassey). Marina Novikova observes an irreconcilable opposition between “spiritual” and “fleshly”,
“high” and “low”, “divine” and “diabolical” as an inherent characteristic of Russian philosophy of gender, and,
consequently, a deep de-erotisation of feminine nature in Russian culture, i.c. in (icon-)painting. She traces back
this de-erotisation to the orthodox aspect of Russian culture and the ideology of Socialist Realism. Drawing
upon, inter alia, trauma theory, Olivia Macassey argues that the reason for the sex appeal of setting in the Period
film (Jane Campion’s The Piano and David Lean’s A Passage to India) lies, paradoxically, not in its
enhancement of the power of the erotic, but rather in its link to the traumatic.

As the editor of this compilation of essays, I would like to thank all contributors. A special note of
gratitude goes to dr. Rob Fisher and dr. Jones Irwin, who organized the conference and whose ideas about
interdisciplinary work are at the basis of the present volume. Finally, I thank dr. Rob Fisher also for publishing
this volume (Inter-Disciplinary.Net).

Koen De Temmerman

Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O. - Vlaanderen)
Ghent University, Belgium
 Twelve contributions: abstracts and keywords

Jennifer M. Collins Metaphors, the erotic & survival or How I learned to use a tool of
repressive normalization as an instrument of eroto-sexual revolution

The layered silence that incest, as well as other forms of oppression and abuse, requires and enforces
creates victims with technical access to language, yet the experience of a disconnection between their words and
their meanings. This paper deals with the linguistically-deployed aspects of abuse, particularly via the interstices
enacted through the use of (inherently erotic) figurative language, and discusses the ways in which an erotic
writing practice can be utilized to re-eroticize their linguistic as well as physical selves. An abuser's requirement
of constant confession denies victim/survivors any sense of verbal agency, and gradually denies them access to
their erotic power, often expressed linguistically via metaphor: the figurative, the transgressive. Metaphor offers a
means through which to know ourselves and our situations in a new light - yet, it is important to remember that
when something is highlighted, something else is always occluded. Metaphors in common usage must be
interrogated, or at least utilized intentionally, lest survivors find themselves "victimized" once again by
metaphors/visions/identities that are supported by the Powers-That-Be, which are ever interested in furthering
their own reach rather than encouraging those over which they have power to think critically about their situations
and selves.

Keywords Creative writing, survivor narrative, women’s/sexuality studies

Koen De Temmerman Erotic Rhetoric. The Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

This paper takes a literary-historical approach towards the concept of the erotic and examines the
representation of the erotic in the ancient Greek novel. I draw upon David Konstan’s observation that it is
precisely the representation of the erotic in the Greek novel that provides the genre with a unique place within its
literary and cultural context, and I argue that the rhetorical technique of èthopoiia is a device in shaping this
representation. By taking as an example Xenophon of Ephesus’ novel Ephesiaca, this paper emphasizes the
importance of rhetorical techniques in shaping basic ideas in the novel, and shows how the Greek novel, a fictive
and narrative prose genre from late antiquity, constitutes the first currently known literary locus in which the
dominant sexual ethics of 2000 years to come are represented.

Keywords Ancient Greek novel, Xenophon of Ephesus, sexual symmetry, rhetoric,

progymnasmata, èthopoiia.

Andrew Feldmár Dr. Love And Mr. Death

The etymology of sex comes from “to cut” (sexus). Had it been important to associate sex with “to
connect”, our word for it would be nex (nexus). The author will speculate, based on clinical material, dreams,
LSD induced, or hypnotically accessed experiences, about how severance, cutting, and the absence of connection
can generate separation anxiety which can then be mistaken for sexual desire. Under what conditions is it ethical
to satisfy sexual desire? When is it in the service of malice, carelessness, neglect? When is sex truly erotic, and
when is it a tranquillizer for separation anxiety? How do orgiastic experiences unite the faculties of the soul?
One person to another? The universe of human life to that of nature and the gods? How much of sex is zoe and
how much bios ? Giorgio Agamben points to this distinction in Greek for what we have only one word for in
English: life.
Also, the Greek word teleo signifies “to be perfected”, “to marry”, and “to die”, all three at once. Using
ideas discussed in Coomaraswamy's Metaphysics, these connections will be explored. The writings of R. D.
Laing (Sonnets) and the poet Anne Carson (Eros: The bittersweet) will also be used to take us deeper into this
study of lust, ruthless or ruthful, sanctioned or taboo, gentle or transgressive.

Keywords Sexual desire, separation anxiety.

x Twelve Contributions: Abstracts and Keywords

Alphonso Lingis Comparative or Intensifying Words

Among animal species, courtship, involving ornamentation and ostentatious ritual behaviour, is the
norm. Glamour was introduced into Western civilization by the Medieval knights. But in the epoch of mercantile
and imperialist nation-states, glamour became taboo to men and took refuge in women. In today’s global market,
female glamour is a pilot industry. Value terms such as ‘strong,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘good,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘sexy’ can be
used comparatively, to classify and rank. But they can also be used, outside of any comparison, to consecrate and
intensify inner states. Consecrating and intensifying one’s beauty and sensuality are depersonalizing.
Consecrating one’s sensuality induces an abandon of the ego; the contemplation of beauty is ecstatic.

Keywords Courtship, sexual selection, glamour, knights, value terms, consecration,

intensification, depersonalization.

Olivia Macassey Carnal (Un)knowing: the Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period film

What makes the past so sexy? In the last two decades there have been a significant number of romantic
mainstream films, set in our colonial pasts. The subject of these films is primarily erotic. As texts, these films
are informed by post-colonial conditions of production – contemporary conditions in which there are
knowledges of the traumatic, often violent realities of colonization. However, there is no trace of the ‘reality’ of
the past in Period films. Or is there?
The most common explanation for why history is romanticised so often in the Period film has been that
the setting – so often restrictive and sartorially elaborate - facilitates the filmic expression of sexual desire. That
is, contemporary notions about historical erotics make the past a good structural match for the expression of
current concerns. However, this does not adequately account for the persistent combination of return and
effacement which characterises the genre.
Cathy Caruth has noted that, in encountering trauma, there is the possibility of a history that is not
straightforwardly based on the referential. That is, an atemporal history of erasures and substitutions. Her
observations on trauma offer a possible insight into the question of Period romance; for this type of history is
surely what we are encountering here. In fact, the structure of trauma is explicitly present in the period film,
because the erotic, like the traumatic, is too corporeal to be straightforwardly symbolised.
This paper brings trauma theory, postcolonial theory and film theory to bear on several Period films,
including Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984). I argue that the reason
for the sex appeal of setting lies, paradoxically, not in its enhancement of the power of the erotic, but rather in its
link to the traumatic. The structure of the erotic body itself enables us to address unpalatable spectres of history
through temporality, analogy, and displacement.

Keywords Period film, trauma, Jane Campion, David Lean.

Peggy Manouka Eros and War, Eros and Betrayal, Eros and Thanatos: Forces Leading to a
Cosmic Whole

Tracing the multiple theoretical and philosophical links between Eros and Thanatos, this essay aims to
analyse their fusion and manifestation through the pairs “Eros and War” and “Eros and Betrayal.” Eros and War
will be analysed in terms of the creative and destructive instincts and the ecstasy and explosion they bring about,
as well as the blending of pain and pleasure. Cosmogony and cosmic destruction are constant incidents, strongly
linked to the simultaneous existence of Eros and War, as they are strongly linked to the simultaneous existence
of Eros and Thanatos. I will approach the holistic character of Eros and War by accepting the assumption that the
activity of Eros is unifying-identifying, while the activity of War is dissociating-differentiating. Betrayal will be
analysed from religious and psychoanalytical perspectives, as betrayal in family relationships, disillusion and
non-fulfilment of expectations in romance and marriage, abandonment of lover or spouse, erotic deviance, and
betrayal of the body. Betrayal will be presented as a phenomenon necessary for the human evolution. Rather than
restricting, it marks and reveals human existence, leading the human being towards the discovery of the inner
self, and constituting a medium of reaching identity. Betrayal will be treated as an unavoidable experience and as
action necessary for the initiation of the human being in the mystery of life, death, and Eros. Betraying and being
betrayed mean accepting a fate of questing full of victories and defeats, and identifying the self as a unique being
that needs to be free from collective orders and models. The process of individualisation often demands
conflicts; it demands ruptures that mark the individual’s life, which means to betray. Without betrayal, therefore,
there may be neither fulfilment nor transformation.
 Twelve Contributions: Abstracts and Keywords xi

Keywords Eros, betrayal, war, thanatos.

Lorraine Markotic Deleuze in Waiting

This paper argues for the relevance of Giles Deleuze’s theory of masochism to Ha Jin’s novel Waiting.
Deleuze’s essay “Coldness and Cruelty” explores the phenomenon of masochism. Deleuze puts forward a theory
of the specificity of masochism. He systematically refutes the idea that sadism and masochism are intertwined,
or even that they are two sides of the same coin; in his view, they are both mutually exclusive and asymmetric.
I contend that Deleuze’s emphasis on delay and waiting as essential to the experience of masochism
provides insight into the novel. In Waiting, the protagonist, Lin, must wait eighteen years to consummate his
relationship with his lover. Lin is involved, like Deleuze’s masochist, I maintain, in the construction of his
situation. Also relevant to the novel are Deleuze’s emphasis on waiting as a precursor to (not a condition of)
pleasure, and his insistence on the importance of a contract for, and on the expulsion of the father in, masochism.
In conclusion, I suggest that Ha Jin’s novel Waiting can be insightfully illuminated by Deleuze’s theory
of masochism, but that, at the same time, the novel can be understood to indicate a problematic aspect of
Deleuze’s theory of masochism’s exclusivity.

Keywords Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, Deleuze, masochism, Ha Jin,

Waiting.

Brendan Moran Eros thanatos in Benjamin's Goethe’s Elective Affinities

Benjamin's 1922-study, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, contains extensive elaboration of Eros. Many

consider this elaboration to be indicative of a spiritual tendency of the “early” Benjamin. In the Elective
Affinities-study, however, Benjamin associates Eros with “inclination” (Neigung). This association of Eros with
inclination will be examined in this paper with regard to Eros thanatos as the play of death in love.
Such play of death in Eros will be presented not as escapism, as some have suggested, but rather as
freedom from the myth of beautiful semblance. The myth of beautiful semblance (schöner Schein) involves
identification with a specific appearance or social form. Had Eros prevailed more in Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Goethe's novel of 1809), Benjamin suggests, the characters would have opened to “Neigung” as a force freeing
them from the ostensible completeness of semblance. With “Neigung,” the body would have broken the seal of
beautiful semblance.
As death in Eros (Eros thanatos), inclination enters all loving as a demonstrative admission that the
human is not quite able to love. The admission of incompleteness redeems Eros as death, the force that cannot be
lived. This force of incompleteness may be called “death,” for the “beauty” not relinquished in “love” will
indeed eventually die.

Keywords Benjamin, Goethe, philosophy, Eros, thanatos, love, death, inclination, aesthetics.

John Augusten Nijjem Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self

The concept of the erot(et)ic fuses the notions of eros (lack and desire) and erotesis (quest(ion)ing and
praxic orientation) as part of a project of de-psychologising and so re-existentialising and therefore re-
ontologising our understanding of the erotic. This paper discusses the erotics of self and phenomena against the
background of the evacuation of ontology in modern epistemology and in terms of the non-evacuable theological
sense of ontology, both premodern and, to some extent, phenomenological. I will distinguish between two major
modes of erotesis or questioning with a view to showing that the ontological sense of the most basic mode of
erotesis is to be grasped essentially in terms of transcendence and the erotic. This is to say that
phenomenologically eros is a primordial mode of transcendence or non-theoretical intentionality that,
accordingly, does not alienate or objectivise experience in relation to the self but thematises the self within lived
experience as both responsive to and orientationally informing of experience. We may speak of eros then as self-
questioning being-in-the-world; a self-questioning being-there that at once attests to our existentially projective,
what I will call pleromatising possibilities as well as to our constitutive lack and need of being (or alterity) (By
‘pleromatising’, based on pleroma meaning ‘fullness’, I mean a dynamic disposition in relation to being,
transcending ‘the given’ in its static presentation). I will discuss these matters with reference to Plato’s
xii Twelve Contributions: Abstracts and Keywords

Symposium and the Allegory of the Cave, as well as the thought of Heidegger, The Essence of Truth and
Gadamer, Truth and Method.

Keywords Eros, erotesis, the erot(et)ic, onantology, transphenomenality, dialectical eroticism,

pleromatising.

Marina Novikova The erotic concept of “feminine” in Russian cultural tradition: between
Orthodoxy and Socialism

In the majority of western and post-Soviet Russian gender studies we find the idea of the dominant
feminine nature as one of the most powerful bases of Russian cultural tradition. Basically, the culturological
image of Russia embodies a subconscious feminine element, so – called assembled maternal archetype (Russia =
Mother – land = Saint Rus = Virgin Mary), whereas Western World represents the idea of the masculine,
individualised culture. However, Russian concept of “feminine” has its unique specific character, which differs
from the gender cultural models of Western Europe. I mean the irreconcilable opposition between “spiritual” and
“fleshly”, “high” and “low”, “divine” and “diabolical” put into the basis of Russian philosophy of gender. In this
sense, Russian “feminine” – culturally and historically – is destined to represent highest spiritual and moral
values while the “underground”, sensual part of existence happens to be dramatically neglected.
As a consequence, there is a deep de-erotisation of feminine nature in Russian culture (widely reflected
in Russian philosophical, literary and visual arts traditions), which traces still remain obvious in post-Soviet
contemporary cultural environment. Undoubtedly, the main reasons for such an intense opposition between body
and soul lays inside the orthodox aspect of Russian culture, where a woman initially played a part of “spiritual
guide” – protecting, inspiring, saving a man, and, even, often sacrificing herself in a name of higher needs
(Russian Mother of God, Saint Sofia, La Belle Dame in Block’s poetry etc).
Meanwhile, absolutely the same idea of denial of physiological, erotic and sensual values lays in the
basis of the ideology of Socialist Realism, which represents a woman as a favourite object of state ideological
manipulation, whose “real lover” is replaced by the idea of social power and high social status. What is a true
nature of such a coincidence? Does it mean that the socialist theory “borrowed” its ideological concept of gender
from the Russian orthodox tradition? If so, what is the profound meaningful coherence between them? And,
above all, was the beginning of 20th century the real short period of the erotic liberation in Russian history and
culture? “Silver age of Russian sensuality”, did it, actually, exist?

Keywords Feminine, Russia, orthodoxy, socialism.

Chris L. Smith Differential Mechanisms: Form, Matter and Sado-masochism

This paper takes two critiques as its departure point. The first is a critique of hylomorphism and the
second a critique of the psychoanalytic interpretation of sadomasochism. The critique of hylomorphism focussed
upon is that made by Gilbert Simondon in his text L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (1964). It is a
critique picked up by Gilles Deleuze in his collaborative works with Félix Guattari. The critique of
sadomasochism to be explored emerges in an essay by Deleuze; “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967). The conception
of the masochist in this text will be explored. The intention is not to compact masochism and the critique of
hylomorphism into a discrete entity but to consider how the ‘differential mechanisms’ of the critiques connect
and in particular how the body of the masochist tends to serve as what Deleuze and Guattari were to call the
conceptual persona [personnage conceptual] for both critiques.
For those that deal in specific concrete ‘technologies of the self’ the body of the masochist is a gift. In
architectural theory and other disciplines engaged in cultural tectonics, notions of fetish, flesh, sexualised and
gendered bodies have been a determined preoccupation over recent decades. The locus of these notions,
however, seems to be that of a negotiation of spatialities that occur in relation to form and function. The body of
the masochist is of interest not only in its intensity as an image but because it negotiates the concrete of reality
like no other: It privileges an alternate locus for an alternate spatiality; that which occurs between form and
matter.

Keywords Body construct, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Hylomorphism, Masochism

 Twelve Contributions: Abstracts and Keywords xiii

Katarzyna Wieckowska and The erotic and the Pornographic: an Interdisciplinary

Przemyslaw Zywiczynski Perspective

In contemporary academia, the erotic occupies the space of the sanctioned sexually explicit text: as an
objet d’art, its function is no longer to stimulate sexual excitement, but rather to give aesthetic delight. In
contrast to its illegitimate other - the pornographic - the erotic, ruptured from history and canonized, becomes a
‘proper’ object of study. The difference between the two, however, is not clearly marked: both spring from the
forbidden wish to violate the social taboos that dominate a particular historical period, and, by transgressing the
established norms, both participate in the work of re-defining the field of possible significations.
This paper is an inquiry as to the place of the pornographic in the production of culture, framed by the
question of the distribution – and possible transgression – of gender roles in pornography. The transgressional
character of pornography is investigated via the analysis of discourse in select pornographic films; the analytical
goal is facilitated through the comparison of sex elicitation in pornography to the prototypical human courtship
scenario. It is concluded that pornography should not be viewed as a form of deranged sexual behaviour but as
depicting the male phantasmagoria about a maximally receptive female.

Keywords Erotic, pornographic, gender roles, discourse analysis.

 PART I

Philosophical Approaches Towards the Erotic

 Eros thanatos in Benjamin's Goethe’s Elective Affinities

Brendan Moran

Benjamin’s 1922-study, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, is unique among his writings for its
concentrated and careful elaboration of Eros. Other texts by him certainly discuss love, and concern with Eros is
evident in many of his works. Some of these will be used occasionally here for the sake of nuance, contrast, or
elaboration. The Elective Affinities-essay will be the focus of this paper, however, by virtue of the consideration
in it of the relationship of Eros with “inclination” (Neigung) that is associated with death. The secondary
literature on Benjamin’s essay does not seem to include discussion either of the importance of inclination or of
the association of inclination with a notion of Eros thanatos - that is, with a relevance of death to love.
As a powerful urge or longing, love is unavoidably bound, according to Benjamin, with nature that is
ultimately unrecognisable, nature that prevails over, and destroys, all perceptions and conceptions. Inclination
(Neigung) is, however, a sensory possibility for the human to open to, to engage, this destructive, preponderant,
ultimately unrecognisable, force. As sensory engagement of the human with this nature, inclination is integral to
love.
The word “inclination” probably cannot be found in the available English translation of Benjamin’s
essay. "Neigung" is translated there as "affection," which is more commonly a translation of "Zuneigung,"
although it is also a secondary translation of "Neigung." Benjamin's discussions in the Elective Affinities-essay
and elsewhere often seem, however, to involve critiques of Kant’s treatment of “Neigung” (in various of the
latter’s moral-philosophical writings), and “inclination” seems preferable as a translation of Kant’s notion of
“Neigung“ as well as of “Neigung“ as the basis for Benjamin’s attempted overcoming Kant's bifurcation of
sensibility and ethical potential.
Kant's transcendental “I” (Ich) and its spontaneity are not, according to Benjamin, constitutive of the
freedom of the individual or of the will to freedom. In a note of 1918, Benjamin says that Kant's ethics tends to
regard independence from "bodies" (Leiber) solely as a possibility of turning away from history rather than as
also a possibility of turning towards it. Whereas Kant considers the concept of “inclination” (Neigung) to be
“ethically indifferent or anti-ethical,” Benjamin suggests this concept can – “through a change in meaning” – “be
turned into one of the supreme concepts of morality [Moral].” 1
In this note on Kant’s ethics, Benjamin suggests inclination could perhaps even take the ethical place
occupied by “love” 2 . In the Trauerspiel-book (of 1925/28), Benjamin contrasts mourning (which has an
“astonishing persistence” of “intention” and feels especially “bound” to “the fullness [Fülle] of an object”) - with
love, which is persistent, but not “playfully” persistent. 3 Such mourning plays its object; it performs the object in
its independence from specific appearances, perceptions, or conceptions. It involves the persistent return of the
object as a problem of presentation (Darstellung), a problem of performance, which is a problem of play. 4
Something such as this kind of mourning, although distinguished above from “love,” seems integral to the
Platonic Eros (albeit an adapted, very corporeal Platonic Eros) elaborated by Benjamin as the philosophical
approach of the Trauerspiel-book. 5 The most effective Trauerspiele (mourning plays) are, moreover, portrayed
by Benjamin as exemplary of, or for, this philosophical approach in which performance or presentation is a
recurrent problem of play, a recurrent problem of sensory engagement. 6
Benjamin’s somewhat earlier written study, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, treats Eros, death, and
inclination as inextricable from one another; inclination is treated as the play of death in love. This intertwining
of Eros, death, and inclination indicates that Benjamin’s study is somewhat distinct from the dualism of body
and spirit that is generally alleged by commentators to be effective in the Elective Affinities-essay, commentators
who consider the notion of Eros in the Elective Affinities-essay to be indicative of a spiritual tendency
supposedly effective in the “early” Benjamin. 7
The love elaborated in Benjamin’s study of Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's novel of 1809)
concerns nature engaged by inclination; love is portrayed as a feeling, a sensation, effective in inclination of, and
for, nature that is free of convention or law. According to Benjamin, Goethe - however unwittingly - defers to
the standard of marital law while unable to let "true love reign" in either of two principal extra-marital couplings
in Elective Affinities. 8 It would not, of course, be possible for humans to survive as societal beings if they were
impelled to have true love reign entirely. This lack of love is, or has been so far, what makes society an
inextinguishable myth in human life. One attempts or presumes to separate oneself from the force of love,
however, only in a futile secession from the necessity that is destructive nature (nature not indulging such
attempts of secession). 9 Whereas law is a secessionist illusion vis à vis destructive nature, love involves
performance of incompleteness in relation to this nature. Had true love reigned in Elective Affinities, the
characters would have opened to “inclination” (Neigung) as a force freeing them from the ostensible
completeness of semblance. With inclination, with engagement of the sensation of destructive nature, the body
would have broken beautiful semblance, which is the allure of apparent necessity - in this case, the allure of
apparent necessity in the norms and the law associated with a marriage. All main characters in Goethe’s novel
2 Eros thanatos in Benjamin’s Goethe’s Elective Affinities

ultimately subordinate their feelings and their deeds to this beautiful semblance. As opening to the sensation of
destructive nature, in contrast, inclination recalls that no semblance, no appearance imbued with convention or
law, is love; in this way, inclination breaks down the association of love with semblance - the allure of which
makes it beautiful semblance.
As the play of death in Eros (Eros thanatos), inclination enters all loving, according to Benjamin, as a
demonstrative admission that “the human,“ “is not able to love." 10 The human is unable to love for at least two
reasons: first, the human’s life is inextricably bound to beautiful semblance (to hypostatized convention and
law); secondly, even insofar as the human engages the force of love, engages destructive nature against the
constraints of beautiful semblance, this inclination - as a consciously attempted engagement - includes
acknowledgement of incompleteness. Such admission of incompleteness redeems love as death, the force that
cannot be lived. The beauty, the allure of appearance, not relinquished in love will eventually fall to death. 11 As
a force ill-disposed to beautiful semblance, love is community with nature that cannot be incorporated into life as
appearance or appearances; it is community with nature that is not subordinate to life that anyone or anything
could “live” in or with living appearances. In other words, love converges with inorganic nature, nature that
prevails over all lives.
Benjamin’s essay was written to some extent against the Goethe-reading by Friedrich Gundolf, a well-
known academic disciple of Stefan George, and it may be an ironic touch that the essay closes with a reading of
a poem titled “Haus in Bonn,” which was written by George for a plaque on the house of Beethoven’s birth. The
last two lines of the poem also serve as the epigraph for the third and final part of Benjamin's Elective Affinities-
essay, 12 and these two lines are noteworthy in the context of Benjamin’s reading: “Eh ihr den leib ergreift auf
diesem sterne/ Erfind ich euch den traum bei ewigen sternen.“ (An English translation could be: “Before you
grasp the body [leib] on this star/ I invent for you the dream among eternal stars.“) In Benjamin’s reading, the
“[s]ublime irony” of “Before you grasp the body [Eh ihr den leib ergreift]” is that this body is never grasped. 13
This body is permeated by the ironizing body, the intractable physis, the destructive nature, that makes
ungraspable whatever is ostensibly graspable. As the ultimate basis for human feeling, destructive nature
involves love, and inclination to love, that can be no will to still this nature.
Accordingly, love undermines passionate attachment to appearances, and love is intolerable for passion
insofar as passion wants the beautiful, wants alluring living appearances, above all else. The “disapproval,” with
which Charlotte and Ottilie turn away after hearing a story that appears as a novella within Goethe’s novel, is
passionate; they find the story disturbing in relation to the beautiful semblance of propriety that they are trying to
maintain in their lives. 14 Benjamin considers this novella, this seemingly disturbing story, to be evocative of love
in its convergence with destructive nature. Neither this destructive nature nor art (in congruence with this sheer
nature) tries to be beautiful; neither attempts to unite with the allure of appearances. Destructive nature and art
only need to unite, to show the unity of, veil - appearance - with the force that cannot be unveiled. Sheer nature
appears solely as the force making appearance transient, and art presents this force by ironizing appearance. Art
has “the essentially beautiful” - that for which beauty is essential - abated so that nakedness, for instance, is no
unveiling but rather a presentation of the unity of veil (the body as appearance, as Leib) with the veiled (the
nature that cannot be entirely revealed in or by this body). The young man in the aforementioned novella or
story, which (for Benjamin) participates in the emergence of art in Goethe’s largely mythic novel, has no
contemplative, observing relationship with the young woman’s naked body; he undresses her “not out of lust but
for the sake of life” (he removes her wet clothing to save her from a potentially fatal chill). He perceives, rather,
the “majesty” (Hoheit) that her body has acquired in the love, which led him to save her, after she - in despair
over his apparent obliviousness to her feelings for him and over her impending marriage to another man - casts
herself from a moving boat. Whereas Ottilie's “living body” (lebendiger Leib) - subordinate to the living and
their law - is only a beauty of semblance (scheinhafte Schönheit), the “veilless nakedness” - the naked “body”
(Körper) - of the young woman in the novella is scarcely noticeable in the wake of her majestically sublime
deed. 15 In her defiance, the young woman in the novella is “not essentially beautiful.” Her “grace“ or “charm“
(Anmut) is accompanied by “ein befremdendes Wesen“ - an odd, displeasing, strange being - that deprives her
of “the canonical expression of beauty.“ 16 Against Ottilie’s and others’ perplexed Job-like passion of ultimately
submissive agony under beautiful semblance, the novella performs love resonating against living semblance to
facilitate a transformation of it. 17 If such a presentation may still be considered beauty and thus, as Kant might
suggest, limited by the allure of specific objects in which it appears (“a relational-character is the basis of
beauty”), it is nonetheless engaged with, resonates with, limitless, critical (semblance-destroying) sublimity. 18
The novella is thus strange to the semblance-intoxicated eye, which otherwise prevails in Goethe’s text.19
“[T]he sober light” (das nüchterne Licht), integral to the “real [rechte] wildness” of the young woman
and the her eventual partner, wakens the young man to the power of what he cannot see. Her “furious attack”
(above all, her leap into the river) is “directed against the eyesight of the beloved” - the man who until now
 Brendan Moran 3

seems unable to notice either her feeling for him or her reluctance about the impending marriage to another man.
Whereas he had hitherto let his feelings remain in the power of his eye settled on semblance, her attitude is that
of a love “averse to all semblance [abhold allem Schein].” 20
Her death-leap seems, for Benjamin, to be among those elements of the artistic performance in which
love converges with destructive nature. In the secret that is God's nature, Benjamin contends, the human must be
death and love; before God, the “human appears to us as corpse and the human's life as love.” Love and death
enter the “human body [Körper]” as the power to divest, as the power without semblance, the power that is the
secret of God's nature. 21 As an element of artistic presentation, the woman's attempted suicide is not surrender to
the order of semblance so much as a rebellion against it. In this rebellion, as performed in the novella, her leap
into the water initiates the destruction of semblance by her and by the young man lovingly risking his life by
attempting to rescue her. At least in this utopian or artistic (and precisely thereby resonant) context, Benjamin
refers to this will of sembanceless overcoming semblance as a divine will, a will no longer “human,” a will no
longer bound to survival and advancement of the human in the allure of beautiful semblance. With the “death
leap” of the young woman and the young man's rescue of her, the “moment” of common “readiness for death
through divine will” (Todesbereitschaft durch göttlichen Willen) gives the pair “the new life” on which “the old
rights lose their claim.” 22 Unlike the figures in the rest of the novel, the two main figures in the novella do not
attempt to buy “their peace through sacrifice” to such semblance. 23 In this affinity with semblancelessness,
which is distinct from the merely chosen affinities (die Wahlverwandtschaften) of Goethe’s main characters, life
is no longer simply non-death and death is no longer simply non-life. 24
The play of death in Eros is not escapism, as some readers of Benjamin’s text have suggested. 25 This
play of death in Eros contrasts, rather, with the myth of beautiful semblance (schöner Schein), a myth involving
identification with a specific appearance or social form, such as this or that person, one's own person, sexual
phenomena, or the institution of marriage. In Benjamin’s notion of Eros thanatos, inclination is no promise of
redeeming or of saving the human from the flux of destructive nature. It is, rather, precisely the possibility of
sensation engaging destructive nature. That Eros cannot dispense with inclination is not, moreover, “a naked
failure” so much as it is, rather, “the true redemption [wahrhafte Einlösung] of the most profound imperfection”
in “the nature of the human.” This imperfection, the imperfection of the human in destructive nature, prevents
“the completion [Vollendung] of love.” In the human, inclination is simultaneously the failure of love and the
redemption of love's imperfection. 26 Inclination does not complete love, but it also prevents the attempted
subordination of the body to any acclaimed completion. 27
If inclination enters all loving as a demonstrative admission that the human is not quite able to love, 28
the admission of incompleteness redeems Eros as death, the force that cannot be lived. This force of
incompleteness may be associated with “death,” for the “beauty” not relinquished in “love” will indeed
eventually die. 29 If there is any value to a notion of “ ‘infinite’ love,” such love is no “simple” love willingly
facing death on the assumption that it shall, in some way or other, outlast death. 30 Love has its “origin”
(Ursprung) in anticipation or premonition - Ahnen - of “the blissful [seligen] life,” anticipation distinct from a
satisfaction “in the ‘halcyonic’ stillness of the soul.” 31 As the dead bodies of the irresolute Ottilie and Eduard are
placed by one another in Goethe’s novel, the hope correlative to the aforementioned anticipation would be that
they “awaken, if ever, not in a beautiful world but rather in a blessed [seligen] one.” 32 That would be the hope of
Eros thanatos, the love of destructive nature. For the living, such hope is considered by Benjamin to be the
caesura whereby there is an “experience” (Erfahrung) - a “feeling” - that is ostensibly irrelevant for “lived
experience” (Erlebnis). 33 Insofar as it occasionally presents this hope where there is otherwise no hope, Goethe’s
work - however involuntarily - enters the “attitude of the storyteller,” 34 an attitude in which catastrophe shows
itself where it would otherwise be disregarded, would otherwise simply be lived. For Benjamin, the sole purpose
of hope is to tell the catastrophe that is otherwise simply lived. “Only for the sake of those without hope is hope
given to us.” 35 No belief in the lived body to the exclusion of its death, no belief in semblance to the exclusion of
its death, Eros thanatos involves hope of, and for, the transformative, destructive force contained in no
semblance.
4 Eros thanatos in Benjamin’s Goethe’s Elective Affinities

Notes
1. "Zur Kantischen Ethik," VI, 55. Roman numerals, sometimes followed by Arabic numerals, indicate volume
numbers of Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. The following abbreviations will also be used for works by
Benjamin: O = The Origin of German Tragic Drama; W (followed by the volume number) = Selected Writings.
If an existing English-translation has been modified, the pagination for the German text will be italicized (O, 27/
I:1, 207).
2. VI, 55.
3. O, 139/ I:1, 318.
4. O, 142/ I:1, 321.
5. O, 30-1, 38-9/ I:1, 210-11, 218-20. See too: I:3, 927, 930.
6. For example, see: O, 61-3, 80-4, 88-91, 98-9, 113, 117-23, 127/ I:1, 241-3, 259-63, 267-70, 276-7, 292, 297-
302, 306. See too: W 1, 61/ II:1, 140.
7. Quite recently, Sigrid Weigel, “Eros,” in Benjamins Begriffe (I), eds. M. Opitz & E. Wizisla (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 313-14.
8. W 1, 345/ I:1, 188.
9. This is independence that the Trauerspiel-book calls an "illusion” or semblance (Schein) (O, 230/ I:1, 404).
10. W 1, 345/ I:1, 187.
11. W 1, 353/ I:1, 198.
12. W 1, 333/ I:1, 172.
13. W 1, 355-6/ I:1, 200-1.
14. W 1, 344/ I:1, 185. After hearing the story, Charlotte departs in agitation and is followed by Ottilie (Goethe,
Elective Affinities, 245/ Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 179).
15. W 1, 351-3/ I:1, 196-7. Concerning “Scheinlosigkeit des nackten Körpers,” see Winfried Menninghaus, “Das
Ausdruckslose: Benjamins Metamorphosen der Bilderlosigkeit,” in Für Walter Benjamin, eds. Ingrid
Scheurmann & Konrad Scheurmann (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), 179-80 (or the very slightly altered
English version: “Walter Benjamin's Variations of Imagelessness,” 169).
16. W 1, 348-9, 344/ I:1, 192-3, 186.
17. W 1, 348/ I:1, 191.
18. W 1, 351/ I:1, 195-6. For Kant, supersensibility is more exclusively the realm of the sublime: I. Kant,
Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 118. (It is also obvious, of course, that Benjamin does not
consider the beautiful or the sublime to be determined on subjective grounds [W 1, 351/ I:1, 195-6; cf. Kant,
119]). Although Benjamin distinguishes the beautiful and the sublime less strictly than Kant does in the Critique
of Judgement, he advances a conception of the sublime that is not far from Kant's notion of the sublime as
“limitlessness” (Kant, 90). The “Kantian distinction of the beautiful and the sublime returns this way, and as in
Kant, the latter is connected with God's creation; therefore it is superior to beauty” (Sándor Radnóti, “The Early
Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin,” International Journal of Sociology 7.1 (1977): 82.
19. W 1, 333, 352/ I:1, 171, 196.
20. W 1, 344/ I:1, 186.
21. W 1, 353/ I:1, 197.
22. W 1, 332, 345/ I:1, 170, 188.
23. W 1, 332/ I:1, 170. Not peace with semblance but peace with semblancelessness is their priority. If it follows
this priority or insofar as it follows this priority, even marriage can become supernatural in the “power of true
love” (345/ 188). The sacramental can, of course, be transformed into semblance, into myth (402-3/ I:3, 402-3).
As loving engagement of death's forces (“Über Ehe,” VI, 68-69), however, marriage can involve the
“Verwandtschaft” (kinship or affinity) that is “the closest human boundedness [Verbundenheit]” in terms of both
“value” and “grounds”; in marriage, the bond can become strong enough to qualify as literalization of
metaphorical kinship (W 1, 346/ I:1, 188-9).
24. The early note on marriage (“Über Ehe,” written sometime between early summer of 1918 up to about 1920)
discusses passivity that has life as only “a non-death [ein Nicht-Tod]” and death as only “a non-life [ein Nicht-
Leben].” A marriage founded on the responsibility of love is a sacrament in which God immunizes love against
the danger of sexuality (as a force passively followed) and against the danger of death (as simply non-life) (VI,
68-9). Those with death in life and life in death are immune to death as something that is simply the opposite of
life.
25. For example, Stanley Corngold, “Genuine Obscurity Shadows the Semblance Whose Obliteration Promises
Redemption: Reflections on Benjamin's ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’,” in Benjamin's Ghosts. Interventions in
 Brendan Moran 5

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. G. Richter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 160 &
165.
26. W 1, 344-5/ I:1, 187.
27. W 1, 348-9/ I:1, 191-2.
28. W 1, 344-5/ I:1, 187.
29. W 1, 352/ I:1, 196.
30. W 1, 348-9/ I:1, 191-2.
31. W 1, 352/ I:1, 196.
32. W 1, 355/ I:1, 200.
33. W 1, 354-5/ I:1, 199-200.
34. W 1, 355/ I:1, 200.
35. W 1, 356/ I:1, 201.

References
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works. Vols. 1-4. Edited by Michael Jennings et al. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996-2003.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by R. Tiedemann, H. Schweppenhäuser et al. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974-99.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by J. Osborne. London: New Left Books,
1977.
Corngold, Stanley. “Genuine Obscurity Shadows the Semblance Whose Obliteration Promises Redemption:
Reflections on Benjamin's ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’.” In Benjamin's Ghosts. Interventions in
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by G. Richter, 154-68. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth – Middlesex
– England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1963.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 19. Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1971.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by J.C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
Menninghaus, Winfried. “Walter Benjamin's Variations of Imagelessness.” Translated by T. Bahti & D.C.
Hensley. In Jewish Writers, German Literature. The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter
Benjamin, edited by T. Bahti & M. Sibley Fries, 155-174. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1995.
Menninghaus, Winfried. “Das Ausdruckslose: Walter Benjamins Metamorphosen der Bilderlosigkeit.” In Für
Walter Benjamin, edited by Ingrid Scheurmann & Konrad Scheurmann, 170-82. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1992.
Radnóti, Sándor. “The Early Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin.” Translated by G. Follinus. International Journal
of Sociology 7.1 (1977): 76-123.
Weigel, Sigrid. “Eros.” In Benjamins Begriffe (I), edited by M. Opitz & E. Wizisla, 299-340. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000.
 Eros and War, Eros and Betrayal, Eros and Thanatos:
Forces Leading to a Cosmic Whole

Peggy Manouka

From the perspective of essence, Eros and Thanatos are not mere conditions of organic life. Broadly,
deeply, Eros and Thanatos are two timeless and universal laws between which spreads the dialectic of universe,
the dynamic process of all organic and inorganic material, the beginning and the end of the world, the being and
non-being of the Being, the two halves of the Being. Out of Eros and Thanatos nothing can be perceived… .
Humanity has been always moving within antinomies. Of the greatest antinomies is the one of Eros and
Thanatos, notions interlaced and complementing each other in the interior of the same reality. Without being
opposed, they seem to extend, to penetrate, the one within the other, like most states of being, which cannot be
isolated. Within every erotic tendency there is a core of a destructive process, as in annihilation there is bloom.
Eros and Thanatos are interconnected in a way so magnificent that the individual never escapes from their
influence. Eros is demonstrated as desire for “being” as well as desire for “the being.” It also appears as desire
for “the other” and desire for “not being.” Thanatos appears as sadness for “not-being- any longer” as well as
acceptance of “always-being,” limit and exasperation simultaneously.
A major manifestation of the pair Eros and Thanatos takes place through the interaction of the forces
Eros and War. Like Eros and Thanatos, the pair Eros and War is of great significance for the formation of the
world; it is an a priori condition for the potential of cosmos, nature, society, individual; it is a mysterious pair of
drives that still plays an important role in the life of the postmodernist individual. Eros and War are
simultaneously creative and destructive. They are passionate instincts, vibrations of panic, explosions of life.
They are volcanoes, whose explosions may cover the world with lava of blood and sperm. They accompany all
creatures in their wanderings and adventures. The fact that we continuously realize erotic-polemical phenomena
must be attributed to the primitive forces that make them possible. This dynamic a priori, however, should not
be one-sidedly placed in the area of the divine, in the social environment, or in the life space, and this is why we
ought to persist in the notion of its holistic nature.
The prominent Greek philosopher and critic, Yiannis Tzavaras, has attributed to the notions of Eros and
War a series of not only human but also broader biological and physiological behaviours. Even the inanimate
objects, such as the thunderbolt, the moon, the rock, he argues, may be studied under an erotic-polemical prism
(37). Tzavaras has perceived the couple Eros and War in multiple ways, both as methodological and as
ontological label. For instance, he characterizes intellectual specification and abstraction, inductive and
deductive routes, genesis and decay, critical comparisons and differentiations, as examples of erotic-polemical
method. Moreover, Tzavaras regards as erotic-polemical indications the cognitive, ethical, and poetic human
activity, the sexual arousal, the aggressiveness of humans and animals. And these instances are only few
compared to all those that could be mentioned as examples of the erotic-polemical process (41). It can be
assumed, therefore, that Eros and War are issues of universal character.
I will approach the universal, holistic character of Eros and War by accepting the assumption that the
activity of Eros is “unifying-identifying,” while the activity of War is “dissociating-differentiating” 1 . The pair
Eros and War, as unifying and dissociating dynamics, constitutes the structuring and reconstructing element of
the world. Not only the total of beings but also every single being depends on the genesis and decay brought
about by these forces. Cosmogony and cosmic destruction are constant incidents, strongly linked to the
simultaneous existence of Eros and War, as they are strongly linked to the simultaneous existence of Eros and
Thanatos. Unification and dissociation endlessly alternate and coexist. Without this coexistence, and without a
relation to the universal, Eros and War cannot be perceived, since these tendencies spread in all beings and are
unbreakably connected to a holon, a term borrowed from the Greek language and first used by Arthur Koestler to
express the idea that each entity is simultaneously a part and a whole. Koestler’s concept of holon is particularly
useful as it epitomizes a consistent theme within the parameters of the Eros-War dialectic: “Any system is by
definition both part and whole. No single system is determinant, nor is system behaviour determined at only one
level, whether part or whole” 2 .
The holon is the point from which War as a dissociating force begins and toward which Eros as a
uniting force tends. Thus, the holon is the beginning and the end, the prerequisite condition, in which the pair
Eros and War takes place. Eros seeks unison with something it misses, while discerning the lack of the desired
wholeness. War, on the other hand, perceives the rotten character of decay in the realised wholeness and,
therefore, through dissociation, it aims at having decay vanish. Like Eros and Thanatos, therefore, Eros and War
have a central role in the genesis and decay of the world. According to Tzavaras, genesis is an act of collecting
the different and reshaping to a new identity; it is, therefore, an act of forming identity. Decay, on the other hand,
derives from a plethora of different elements; it is, therefore, an act of differentiation (19). From this process, it
is clear that Eros and War are causes of genesis and decay, of forming identity and differentiating identity.
8 Eros and War, Eros and Betrayal, Eros and Thanatos:
Forces Leading to a Cosmic Whole

As assumed Empedocles, one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers, and the first philosopher
whom Freud recognized as having seen the world as a battlefield of Eros and Thanatos, Eros, apart from being a
cause of genesis, is a cause of death, and War, apart from being a cause of death is a cause of genesis.
Empedocles preached that there is neither absolute genesis nor absolute decline; there is instead, constant
alternation. Everything called genesis and decay is nothing but mixture and separation of eternal essences 3 . In
addition to being causes of genesis and decay, Eros and War are forces. Aristotle defined “force” as something
that has “potential” and “validity” 4 . Eros and War definitely possess the qualities of a force. They both have
potential, which means they have the ability to achieve a goal, acquire the desirable, lead to a result. They are
dynamic energies, and therefore, they do not have the meaning of a complete reality, but, on the contrary, they
constitute the necessary condition for the potential of the real. In addition, as forces, Eros and war are “valid,”
and for this reason, they are not objects to be desired. They already lie in full substance, and therefore, they are
not to be valid somewhere in the future. Eros and War are in force here and now.
Apart from Eros and War, another manifestation of the pair Eros and Thanatos is the constant interaction
between Eros and Betrayal. The human being comes to the world entering a state of ontological display to
betrayal: betrayal of life by death, betrayal of love by hate, betrayal of Eros by disillusion, betrayal of the initial
unison by birth itself. Betrayal is most dramatic because it involves separation. Life is nothing but a long series
of separations, because our existence is marked until the end by emotional bonds, and there is no emotional bond
not taking place under the shadow of loss and separation. It seems as if commitments have been made only to be
broken, and that promises have been given for one single reason: not to be kept. And through this paradox of
betrayal, through this complicated and controversial phenomenon, the individual rebels. Every rebellion is
registered in the sphere of betrayal. Every unique intellectual movement is a betrayal of a previous intellectual
movement; every extraordinary piece of art is an act of betrayal of a previous system of knowledge; every new
discovery is a betrayal of an older one. Our whole existence is marked by the experience of betrayal, behind
which hides the eternal fight between Eros and Thanatos, between life and death. The desire for an unfulfilled
completeness pushes conscience toward new directions, new goals, new dreams. This desire removes us from the
past, from other dreams, from persons we loved. This desire makes us betray, and the memory of betrayal seems
to be surrounding all human thought and all human life.
Betrayal takes place within the frame of two vast symbolic areas: the area of the betrayed, who
pathetically receives betrayal, and thus the area of death, and the area of the betrayer, who acts following a
forbidden desire that does not stop before any prohibition. The scene of life perceives each one of us at times in
the role of the betrayed and at times in the role of the betrayer. Most often, we play both roles simultaneously,
depending on the changes of scenes in the human drama of relationships, where we are victims and victors. To
be betrayed feels like surrendering to a painful process of death, like being forced to experience the pain of
abandonment and loss. Each death, however, seems to be a “sacred” process of transferring to new forms of
existence. As Carl Jung reminds, the development of personality almost always passes from a deathly sacrifice,
and if we manage to process the experience of betrayal and mourning, the result may be transformation (85).
Betrayal might seem abhorring to our conscience. Nevertheless, without maturation deriving from the
experience of betrayal, we remain trapped in the unconscious, repeated questing of a merger with another person.
We remain out of the mystery of life forever. If we never change direction, we refuse to undertake the
responsibility of existence as unique and separate entity, because the repetition of the miraculous discovery of
the ego, according to Jung, is possible only if rupture takes place in its temporal consistency and in its beliefs
(92). Aldo Carotenuto observes that the “law of the soul, the creative demon of human beings, the longing for
freedom and individuation, is expressed through the logic of betrayal” (254). The result of “loyalty” to a specific
object, therefore, is likely to make the individual static, unhappy, and unfulfilled. Since the moment that desire
for fulfilment turns to one specific object, loss has already taken place. And since it is impossible that desire not
turn to a specific object, because this is one of the greatest pleasures in a person’s life, betrayal is an unavoidable
experience. Betrayal is an action necessary for the initiation of the human being in the mystery of life, death, and
Eros. With all the pain it brings, it is also the beginning of magic, the basis of all erotic passion, the power of all
growth.
Betraying and being betrayed mean accepting a fate of questing full of victories and defeats, identifying
the self as a unique being that needs to be free from collective orders and models. Every individual must be
liberated from all those aspects that maintain loyalty to an image that does not fulfil the individual expectations
but the expectations of the social environment or other people’s desires. For this reason, the process of
individualisation often demands conflicts; it demands ruptures and separations that mark the individual’s life,
that mark all human experience. Certainly, separation from someone, on whom we have emotionally invested,
causes tremendous pain, but we cannot and we should not avoid this pain. We must live pain until the end. This
process is what Freud called therapeutic processing of mourning, which, when given the appropriate time and
place, frees the individual 5 . The choice lies always ahead, not behind, and the challenge is accepted because it
opens new dimensions. If we spend our lives protected from the unexpected, we will never find the path that
leads far from disillusions. As life is a passing from one target to another, and as human beings are of
 Peggy Manouka 9

teleological nature, any progress toward another phase entails the experience of rupture; it entails the experience
of betrayal. Without betrayal, therefore, there may be neither fulfilment nor transformation.
It is of great significance that we reflect on Eros and Thanatos as forces of growth in the path of human
life. It is also essential that every human being, in the effort to find essence and purpose in life, should give a
deep insight into the manifestations of War and Betrayal, not as negative factors leading to moral deterioration
but as forces contributing to the process of maturation, individuation, and spiritual exaltation. It is essential that
we understand that contrary to annihilation, the powerful coexistence of Eros, Thanatos, War, and Betrayal
expresses the total and definitive element of the human being. This powerful coexistence magnificently proves
and that in every circle the end is unending and the end is a beginning as well.

Notes

1
I. Tzavaras, Eros-War: An Essay of Cosmotheory (Athens: Dodoni, 1993), 13.
2
Quoted in R. Anderson, I. Carter & G. Lowe, Human Behavior in the Social Environment: A Social Systems
Approach (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 5.
3 8
Empedocles, Encyclopedia Domi (1976 ), 390.
4
I. Sikoutris, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Athens: Estia, 2000), 34.
5
S. Freud, Essays of Metapsychology (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2000), 112.

References

Anderson, Ralph, Irl Carter & Gary Lowe. Human Behavior in the Social Environment: A Social Systems
Approach. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992.
Carotenuto, Aldo. Eros and Passion: The Boundaries of Love and Pain. Athens: Itamos, 2002.
8
Empedocles. Encyclopedia Domi. 1976 .
Freud, Sigmund. Essays of Metapsychology. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2000.
Jung, Carl. The Psychology of the Transference. Athens: Iamvlichos, 1997.
Sikoutris, I. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Athens: Estia, 2000.
Tzavaras, I. Eros-War: An Essay of Cosmotheory. Athens: Dodoni, 1993.
 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self

John Augusten Nijjem

Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium describes two inceptions of the human condition - one having come to
pass and one as possibly yet to come. Both these beginnings which are in fact punishments are grounded in sins
against the Divine or Eros. The first concerns our individuality as deriving from a more basic state - a primal
I-Thou-being when each was fused lover with beloved. What is more interesting, however, is the threatened second
genesis.
Before this as I say we were unified but now because of our crimes we have been split up. There’s a
danger that if we aren’t well ordered in our behaviour toward the gods we’ll be split up further and go around
like figures in bas-relief on grave stones, sawn in half down the nose like half-dice…. No one should work
against Eros and to get on the wrong side of the gods is to work against Eros. 1
I wish to speculate on this second punishment from the hand of Eros as, in fact, already having occurred
due to our having, in Aristophanes’ words, “[worked] against Eros”. I wish to locate this next genetic or primal
error in modernity itself where, within the dominant tradition of philosophy, there is barely the ability to even
acknowledge Eros in any patent manner.
This second fall is none other than the promised further split of the individual, not into bas-relief but
into sub-individual mind and body or simply into thinking substance, as in Descartes, or mental properties, in
Hume - a state where the conditions for the manifestation or recuperation of Eros are all but destroyed. Eros, in a
Heideggerian key, has fled. Philosophy becomes in modernity (particularly with respect to the
Empiricist/Rationalist, Positivist, Analytic tradition) incapable of the very notion of a relational understanding of
the self above all because the philosophical gaze is turned to and consumed by the problem of intra-personal
dualism, of the constitutive incommensurability of the self with itself in terms of the incommunicables of mind
and matter.
Thought, in this period of rationalism and especially empiricism, becomes basically aggregative,
reductive and calculative in character. The self at bottom seems to become a problematic epistemological device,
a self-sufficient yet, for this, depotentiated consciousness (no longer an active ranger and synthesizing
experiencer) wherein the desire for wholeness, an ontological category, is replaced with the desire for certainty,
an epistemological one. As a corollary of this, the world, in what seems like an ‘anti-transfiguration’, is stripped
bare but not to any exposed erotic or transcendental surface but as it were monstrously - beneath the skin -
stripped of structure, form, purpose, intelligibility. In Modernity entities can be conceived of in an utterly
abstract, remote and phenomenologically inaccessible manner as devoid of self-expression, significance, aspect,
perspective, flesh, human orientation, fruition.
The sin against Eros is compacted so that the self’s problem is not the loss of the erotic-other but
correlatively its own status as self. It follows that the gaze is emptied of its self-transcending categorially
intuitive or ontological, which is to say, erotic dimension. Being is dispersed in a homogenous morass of
impressions or manifolds of sense-data so that the gaze is turned inward toward the supposed theatre of the mind
or the quasi-world of immanence. Here the gaze is revealing only of its own representations and thus is to itself
ultimately its own object. This I call the movement, not from ontology to epistemology, which misleadingly
suggests the possibility of refounding the magnitude of being on the narrow shoulders of self-certainty, but from
ontology to what I will call onantology or hermeneutic narcissism. This is a movement from transcendence to
immanence, from primal affection to an exclusively representational, self-affecting affection - epistemology, that
is, as incessant and neurotic onanism, as the incapacity for transcendence, for knowledge of the other.
Epistemology purports to be a rational return to being but seems at best to be a taming of it, an act of
12 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self.

self-apportioning - a giving to ourselves of our own lot of ‘reality’ and by extension, willfully, our own
philosophical destiny, our own paideia or itinerarium. 2 The difference here is between the positional, positive
and self-referential consciousness of the onantological and the qualified apophaticism of a truly erot(et)ic attitude
where the ‘object’ of our desire - the desideratum of a putatively complete knowledge - always and constitutively
transcends us. The basic gesture of onantology then is to think by virtue of pre-decided rational or
representational foundations which function to delimit the possibility of, in the broadest sense, the empirical; it is
to subjectively ground experience on a mirroring, on an a priori projection as itself the ground of all possible
knowledge. The erot(et)ic, signifying the erotic force of erotesis, is the antidote to this problem of theoretical or
aprioristic narcissism. The basic gesture of the erot(et)ic is a non-objectifying disclosure, uncovering, of self and
world; an openness to the advent of understandings that put our already established views in question.
In his discussion of the allegory of the cave in The Essence of Truth, Heidegger determines life as
authentic striving and further determines authentic striving as eros. This authentic striving as eros also goes
under the category of attunedness [Gestimmtheit]. He conceives of this attunedness as “constantly and from the
ground up [penetrating] (durchstimmt) our Dasein”. Heidegger thinks of Dasein as being attuned in advance
[abgestimmt] to the delightfulness of “the beings we encounter and to delightfulness as such”. He goes on then to
comment on the moodlessness of science and metaphysics and the erroneousness of metaphysics and science
insofar as these make fundamental designations about existence. “It is not as if” he tells us that “we first find
beings as present, and then find that they delight us. The situation is the reverse: what we encounter is already
attuned in respect of delight and non delight, or hovers between these as indeterminate (which, however, is not
nothing), and only on the basis of this situation can we then disregard the character of delight/non-delight in
order to look at what we encounter as something merely present”. 3 Thus the moodless, anhedonic epistemic
mode of metaphysics and science is thought of by Heidegger as a derivative of existence’s fundamental hedonic
conditionedness.
This dialectical trajectory of being and becoming in Plato or Being in Heidegger involves in the first
place an erotic durchstimmt or penetrating. It is on the basis of Being’s penetrating of our being that we are in
the first instance erotic beings. Within this dialectic, then, we are first of all addressed - ontologically addressed -
before we ever ourselves become addressors; that is, before we ever become the Subject representing Being to
ourselves we are in a mode of primordial affection. This primordial affection or penetration (durchstimmt) is
conceived of perhaps only in terms of a phenomenological deduction: that we basically experience the world
hedonologically and that we are marked through and through by an ontological eros presupposes that we are
primordially affected by Eros and that phenomenologically speaking, Eros is another name for Being.
Phenomenologically, then, Being is penetration, affection and flight. We are first the eromenos, the
beloved, and only then the erastes the lover. Being makes ‘a pass’ at us, its pass, its Ereignis. In this sense it
gives us our nature, as in each case an erastes, a lover, a desirer, and then withdraws, thereby “holding [us] fast”
in our nature as erastai - that is, in our most basic intentional relation or in Heidegger’s terms our Care, our most
basic concern to which all other psychological, cognitive and empirical concerns attest - our being as Sorge.
We are, in the beginning for both Plato and Heidegger, turned by Being to Being yet our being falters -
we stall in the cave, become absorbed in only present things. Plato, for this absorption in the decontextualised
and in that sense illusory entity, employs the figure of incarceration; against this, however, he, like Aquinas later,
attests to an ultimate belief - that the path of conversion (or of the turning or periagoge) is a path of delight.
Central to our ability to overcome our stalling in the cave is our capacity for and openness to quest(ion)ing, our
capacity for erotesis.
But what is erotesis? Firstly I wish to avoid a merely psychological notion of the question. The question
beyond being a mental event is a fundamental ontological structure of experience. “The essence of the question”
Gadamer tells us “is to open up possibilities and keep them open” 4 , indeed, “we cannot have experiences without
 John Augusten Nijjem 13

asking questions”. 5 By “possibilities” Gadamer does not mean anything subjective or merely intellectual. His use
of “possibilities” in relation to “question” has altogether more to do with our notion of ‘quest’ which at minimum
implies actual engagement, bodily comportment and self-interpretation where these designations have, in the first
instance, a pre-theoretical hermeneutic-ontological sense. So these terms, possibility, question, experience, in
Gadamer and in Heidegger imply the notion of question as quest which is to say as the opening up of a
non-pre-established, non-ready made and therefore non-ontotheological paideia or itinerarium.
The concept of erotesis can be distinguished in at least two ways in this paper, a rhetorical erotesis
where the answer is not only in part already known through being pre-conditioned but expected of being
confirmed, as distinct from the non-interrogative dialectical erotesis where no expectation of certainty, telos, or
autonomous, subject-irrelative objectivity is involved but instead where questioner and questioned are
constituted in and through their relation with each other in mutual uncertainty. Socratic erotesis, notwithstanding
Platonic ontotheology, is in its method at least, a learned unknowing; it is in this sense thoroughly dialectical. Yet,
as we have said, the pull of the ontotheological and of metaphysical certainty mean that Socratic erotesis as
opposed to Heideggerian erotesis is underwritten by an epistemological optimism. In this sense there is
something rhetorical about it - not in its exercise but in its ultimate orientation and promise.
So, rhetorical erotesis, another name for onantology, is, as we have said, any questioning which has in
some way already determined the answer. However, all questioning, even dialectical questioning, places limits
on the range of possible answers. To respond to a question is to be in de facto subscription to that question’s
assumptions and by extension orientation. Within a dialectic, the assumptions and orientation of the question can
be subverted or transcended yet even then this subversion or transcending is itself guided by and in reference to
the very question that it overcomes. So the discursive quest does not have to be thought of as teleological or
end-driven but rather as what I will call ‘pleromatising’ by which I mean a pathway of questioning which is not
so much a linear end-driven trajectory but rather a circling or spiraling wherein meaning is constantly enriched,
enlarged and revised yet never completed. This is to talk about the erotics of the hermeneutic circle whereby
understanding, in its priming, backwards and forwards, intuitive and spontaneous engagement, is, as it were,
always foreplay in an expansive yet never consummate grasp of the text or phenomenon. The pleromatising of
dialectical erotesis, the erot(et)ic, underlines the fullness, indeed, infinitude of the account of what is being
sought after or investigated; it is zetetic without being directionless and ordered without being univocally
teleological. Pleromatising is here therefore the opposite of reducing. Things are to be understood always with a
ground sense of ‘there is more to be known’ as opposed to the resolving to basic components or laws typical of
mechanics or physicalism. The ground sense of ‘there is more to be known’, of pleromatising, gives priority to
understanding over explanation and does so through the magni-fication of intelligibility via the multiplication of
perspectives and contexts.
Gadamer writes that the “Real and the fundamental nature of a question” is to “make things
indeterminate”. He goes on to say that “questioning opens up possibilities of meaning”. 6
The work of the question which is a making indeterminate involves the shifting of perspective and the
willingness to transcend current horizons of sense-making - to decontextualise and recontextualise for the sake of
a pleromatising of the phenomenon and a correlate dilation in the intentional relation of the knower, an increase
in his or her be-ing, that is, a broadening of the intelligibility that is self and world. The essence, then, of the
phenomenon of the question is grounded in the non-totalisable nature of reality, the fact that things are, in
Sartre’s term, exhibitors of a property presupposed by all actual and possible properties, namely the property of
transphenomenality. 7 Transphenomenality means that 1) the relation of the knower enters into the essence of the
known - that things do not exist simpliciter, devoid of all cognitive orientation, and 2) that things, all the same,
always outstrip our finite capacity to enter into cognitive orientations with them; that we cannot assume all
possible positions spatially and temporally, practically and theoretically from which we can know any given
14 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self.

thing. Things withdraw, remain hidden, their manifestness is in a sense always a matter of crisis or erotic need.
What this means is that our knowing is always conditioned by unknowing and our unknowing by knowing; our
determinations are always conditioned by indetermination while indetermination is fruitfully accessed by virtue
and often at the cost of our determinations.
Being alive to this property of properties (by which I mean not empirical predicate but that which is
most proper to entities) is to place oneself outside of the onantological, rhetorical disposition in which the fallacy
of epistemic adequacy prevails; is to subvert the onantological attitude where any given determination or set of
determinations is taken as operatively eminent or absolute or as an ancestor of determinations which will be total,
absolute and closed. Being alive to the transphenomenal is to be in the question such that the realisation of the
inadequacy of our knowledge-claims with respect to the things themselves is never lost. Such a realisation of a
never totalisable surplus of meaning implies the complex consciousness not only of Truth and light but along
with these, untruth and darkness. A pleromatising engagement with entities is fundamentally contingent on
untruth and darkness; indeed, eros has the character of always entering into darkness – a darkness that is both
seductive and rich.
What then is the philosophical imperative of the transphenomenal - an imperative that we see more
often embodied in the artist, with his hunger to mean and give increase, than in the philosopher with his need to
explain and reduce? It is to accept or, better, affirm the erotic nature of the world; to know that what the world or
Being does is “lead us on” such that we can never be totally secure whether in relation to our epistemic positions
or our personal destinies. It is furthermore a knowing which is erotic insofar as it is exquisitely alive to the
perspectival nature of perception and understanding, that is, to its own adumbrative, synechdochic character, its
own tantalizing limitedness or non-totality. This is to say that the mode of an erotic epistemology does not object
to (nor objectify) aspect and finitude such that aspect and finitude are neither posed as the imperfect or the
disagreeable nor, through theoretical sleight of hand, transformed into finished entity. Erotic knowing as
irreducible erotesis is therefore committed to a knowing which is an ekstasis, that is, to a presencing always and
ever radically beholden to an absencing - to a knowing which is always at its edges a non-knowing. Perspective
must give way to perspective and so on if perspective is to be at all. This imperative is above all grounded in
something like a mutual desire, a common hunger for plenitude which correlatively enters into the essence of
humanity and Being. Thus, the transphenomenal imperative is grounded in the need of Being where the word
“of” bespeaks both the human dependence (for it to be at all) on futurity and manifestation as well as Being’s
dependence on human being as the locus of its self-manifesting. Being, in Heidegger’s phenomenological terms,
is that which hides itself but it is also, I think, in Thomistic terms, that which ‘yearns to be conspicuous’ and it is
human being that is a necessary structure or co-term of manifestation or to put it more erotically, indeed,
Platonically, of Being’s epiphany.
What we notice at this point is that essential to the Heideggerian erotetic as to the Socratic is the patent
awareness of our unknowing. Heidegger’s, however, is the more radical for it has eschewed all Socratic
optimism. This Heideggerian unknowing is 1) not corrigible and 2) ontologically basic to human being.
Nonetheless our ontology is to all intents and purposes hidden from us – we are oblivious to it: unaware of that
very unawareness of our unawareness.
The transphenomenal imperative – also another name for the erot(et)ic - implies the need for a
dialectical eroticism, a will to pleromatisation, which is the desire to continually transcend our onantological
tendencies through a vigilance in respect of Being’s incessant withdrawal – a vigilance which is, from the
perspective of Being, a provocation of our erotic impulse or our being as erastai. This is then to speak of a
dialectical eroticism – the basic mood of which is hedone - that wills or colludes with a world that leads us on,
that is committed to the magnitude of the indeterminate, the unshown in the full desire of showing it.
So in terms of this Platonic-Heideggerian syncretism, our being is a return to that which turned to us
 John Augusten Nijjem 15

and in turning to us turned us. To forget this constitutive and preserving sense of return leads to an ontological
entropy wherein Eros, in the manner of the ‘contrapasso’, plays with us, our self-construals, casting us
sardonically into Aristophanic parts, mere minds or bodies or brains (in vats) or brains perpetually sliced and
given over to fusions, fissions….in an incessant decaying, splitting or dissolution of the self. However, eros, it is
implied in Heidegger, is, in the first instance, anti-entropic; it ‘holds us fast’ in our being as erastai.
We may speak of Eros as subjecting us to the contrapasso or in terms of other metaphors such as the
‘flight of Eros’, in order to get at a sense of the loss of eros and the consequences of this loss but what in fact do
we mean by these images?
In the Symposium, Aristophanes tells us that “Eros is the name for the desire and pursuit of
wholeness”. 8 I wish to read “wholeness” in two senses which, roughly speaking, are transcendent and
‘transcendental’ senses. We may take this pursuit of wholeness out of the mythopoetic frame that Aristophanes
has in mind and understand it instead in ontological terms. We may interpret Aristophanes’ words to mean that
basic to our desire is not just the perceiving of integrities, of satisfaction found in the beauty of wholes, but in
and along with this the apperceptive sense of our own emergent wholeness as perceivers. We, insofar as we
desire integrities, are ourselves desiring integrities. That our minds and sensibilities may be affected by the
perpetual novelty and the hidden life of things depends not just on our erotic transcendence toward things but the
continued transcendence of our incessant inclination toward all manner of gross and subtle internalisms (which,
of course, also includes its apparent opposite – externalism, since both positions issue from a more basic starting
point in spectatorial representationalism). With the increase in the account of the intelligible there is a correlate
increase in the being of the knower. But when what counts as knowledge is constrained to the limits of
physicalism this logic of correlative increase is devastated. What obtains, in the place of this, is a logic of
diminution and decomposition. Our being affected by and constituted in terms of the otherness of being is what
underwrites the possibility of our wholeness whereby wholeness implies not an accomplished static state but an
ongoing circulation of self-understanding, an activity, indeed, a flourishing (eudaimoneia). Where the source and
vitality of alterity is occluded and the circulation of self-understanding is blocked there is scleroticisation and
atrophy. To properly comprehend this, however, is to understand ourselves as eros and by extension to recognize
that the term eros is convertible with the term nothingness.
I have already, however, stated that Eros is another name for Being and, indeed, Being ‘is’, properly
speaking, no-thing. Yet there is more to the point here than this: Eros can be said of the self as it can be of the
world; the term therefore stretches across both elements, not of a division but of a difference within a wholeness.
“Eros,” as Aristophanes has said “is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness” yet in terms of his analysis
of Plato’s Allegory, Heidegger, I maintain, has shown that Being is penetration, affection and flight. This is to say
then that before it is “the desire and pursuit of wholeness”, Eros is the initiative of Being in its constitutive
address of our being.
The basic indetermination of consciousness, its nothingness, is the very ground of eros (as ontological
poverty). 9 It seeks those things which are determined - beings - but its pathos is that it can never in any given
thing terminate its quest since the determination of any given thing, indeed, any infinitude of given things is
never enough plenitude for its satisfaction. Consciousness is not some vast, indeed, sublimely empty container
that could in principle be filled but instead it is nothing - it can in principle never find surfeit and is thus through
and through desire, the poverty and need of eros. 10
However, consciousness understood under the description of self is not simply and purely nothing. Here
the ontology is profoundly inflected insofar as the nothingness of consciousness appears as the radical and
fundamentally open-ended to be of the self.
The project of self-constitution involves the relation of the indeterminacy of consciousness with the
provisional determinacy of beings within the active unfolding of to be. What is a being - what is a thing? A thing
16 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self.

cannot be radically mind-independent and still be considered a thing which is to say that notions of the ding an
sich are intrinsically self-contradictory, are category errors that export the structures of experience beyond the
boundaries of experience. To speak of the ding an sich in any manner obvious or subtle is therefore to utter
nonsense. The utter nonsense of this directs us back to the phenomenological. Here we can state that the thing is
precisely what is given to nothing while the possibility of the self-awareness and hence appearance of nothing is
contingent on the thing. Self-deception obtains, however, when the eros that we are denies its structure of
questioning and transcending, its eroteticity. When the self construes itself in terms of the image of the beings
that it represents to itself, it misrecognises the nothingness of consciousness as a thing; this sort of vulgar
ontology whereby the self is also just another thing and indeed can fix itself within representations as it can
things amounts to the destruction of the basic vitality and dynamism of the self. The self as an essentially
‘seeking-self’, here seeks to flee the labour of its search which is an infinite labour; it seeks to cover over the
poverty of its nothingness by extricating itself from the at-traction of being. The self, however, in terms of the
basic structure of its to be is compelled to transcend while remaining in possession of whatever its relation to
being has been thus far. Its being is always a matter of what it has been thus far and also what it can be, however,
it can never, under any description, simply identify itself with either of these dimensions exclusively; more over,
these dimensions condition and constitute each other insofar as its has been prestuctures its sense of its
possibilities while its resolved possibilities bestow new intelligibility on its facticity. The self always transcends
the possibility of any epistemic determination of it. Again, Eros, as in the Symposium is above all the desire for
wholeness, not theoretical totalisation.
The thing is what is given to nothing but how is the thing given? The answer to this question has
profound consequences inasmuch as the way the thing is construed in its givenness will be determinative of the
self’s construal of itself. That things are given in heterogeneous or homogeneous ways, in qualitative or
quantitative ways, in praxic or theoretic ways will count for the way the self comes to be given to itself. When
things come to be given in such a manner that their categorial, eidetic and sensual dimensions are excised from
their account such that things are in fact no longer given but in their place matrices (taken as established or
presumptive) wherein a mathematically describable reality is set independently over and against the static
enquiry of the subject, then there is no longer any sense here in a pursuit of wholeness but at best a charting of
the real as already construed as totality. Access to this construal can mobilize only the narrowest dimensions of
the self. However, the repeated emphasis and reliance on these dimensions of the self has the effect of totalizing
them such that these come to be identified with what is most worthy and important about the self. The rest comes
to appear as a kind of ontologically dubious subjective residuum which out of a certain charity or will to
humanistic affirmation is cultivated as at best an accessory or embellishment of the ratiocinative, calculative life.
Clearly on this account the universe does not require the senses for its genuine manifestation and, consistent with
this, it is perfectly imaginable that some epistemic engine or cyborg would be more suited to this universe than
the human being with its largely superfluous constitution; indeed, the word ‘phenomenological’ comes to be used
by most Anglo-American philosophers in a manner bereft of any ontological force, used, that is, in a way which
implies little more than ‘phenomenally’ or simply ‘subjectively’. 11
The life of the self, its to be, depends upon the fullness of its relation to the fullness of things in the
mood of hedone of which sensual pleasure is essential. The transition from the mode of Zuhandenheit (which
though often construed, on the one hand, merely in terms of an almost theoretically bare in-order-to or according
to the dimensions of the pragmatic and functional, as opposed, on the other hand, to the elementally sensuous or
the purely aesthetic, is in fact the possibility of both of these extremes and thereby more basic than either of them)
to Vorhandenheit is not just a movement from the practical to the theoretical but from the erotic and hedonic
(where our fundamental concernfulness is just as basically an at-tractional sensuousness - an immediate
recognition and compulsion toward the primitive presence of beauty and form) to a virtual moodlessness. In this
 John Augusten Nijjem 17

transition we also move correlatively from a self in activity - exercised and articulated by its desires,
engagements and possibilities - across its own potential horizons of absence to a self more and more reducible to
the status of epistemic object where it is metaphysically ‘cashed out’ in mathematical descriptions or else made
the terminus of an introspective epistemology. The establishing of the primacy of the mode of Vorhandenheit is
not only a depotentiating of the thing but more specifically the devastation of its propriety for impropriety
(whereby - consistent with the broadest conception of the ready-to-hand - what is proper to a thing is its freedom
to be other, to show up differently against varying horizons, that is, to keep to itself its inalienable power for
polyvocity) but of the self whose practical comportments and varieties of pretheorertical, actuating attitude, all
grounded in the fullness of the senses (as opposed to their alienatedness in modes of theoreticism), are also more
and more in their effective redundancy or irrelevance cut away from the new image of the world. 12 This
dismembering of the self for the sake of the uncovering of a basically mathematically describable world is given
one of its earliest expressions in yet another ‘Aristophanic image’ in the writings of Galileo.
But that external bodies, to excite in us these tastes, these odours and these sounds, demanded other
than size, figure, number, and slow or rapid motion, I do not believe; and I judge that, if the ears, the tongue, and
the nostrils were taken away, the figure, the number and the motions would indeed remain, but not the odours
nor the tastes nor the sounds which, without the living animal, I do not believe are anything else than names… 13
The inception of the trajectory toward pure objectivity and final theory happens only at the cost of this
dismembering of the self, a dismembering which happens within the horizon of the broader and more
fundamental trajectory of Eros. We might read this image as intimating a kind of Euripidean sparagmos though
an auto-sparagmos demanded by the hubris of a being whose desire for fixity, self-certainty and absolutism
cannot encounter a too exorbitant price. 14
How does erotesis show up within this trajectory toward final theory? The most concise yet broad image for this
is found in Kant where erotesis appears as the “appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions
that he himself has formulated”. 15 Here questioning is interrogative, rhetorical, it has predetermined the very
nature of the answer; predisposed the entire transaction to a particular theoretical regime of conceptual precision
in a process wherein alterity is in effect erased. It should also be noticed, generally and in relation to Kant, that
rhetorical erotesis presupposes an extant ego, a structured subject or variations on a vatted brain whereas
erot(et)ic questioning is what the fullness of self and world presuppose. Erot(et)ic questioning in
contradistinction to rhetorical erotesis is oriented or calibrated not according to mathesis but the phenomena
themselves. The domain of the phenomena not that of representation has the initiative such that the process of
questioning is from the outset projected toward the novelty of alterity in a manner that discloses, gathers and
further organizes us as directed facticity yet leaves us unconstrained by the matrices of representational
theoreticism. In this way the human being does not, in terms onantological, only everywhere encounter itself in
its ‘encounters’ with the world.
Both of these images, the Galilean and the Kantian, give common expression to the anti-erotic in the
mode of the violent or, indeed, the thanatic; in each case the will to mastery issues in gestures of violence against
both self and other. Basic to both images is the desire to assert the univocal meaning, to lay down the epistemic
frame wherein the properly objective may appear. The erot(et)ic, however, is not merely the establishing of
conversation over interrogation but instead the acknowledgment of and surrender to the charge of the
non-objectifiable, the felt multivalency of being such that its withdrawal is always for us a correlative
being-drawn-out-of-ourselves and so where the condition for the transcendence - for the life - of the self is this
perpetual withdrawing of being, the profound dimension of the lived experience of being’s at-traction. The
notion of conversation with its particular senses of sobriety and propriety where one has already arrived not in a
manner decided but nonetheless already self-possessed, does not capture at all the compulsive and seductive
dimension of perception and understanding; the fascination and inexplicable kindredness that we always already
18 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self.

feel, the abgestimmt of hedone - the excitement at the sense of a discovery which is layered and recursive, which
points up our inadequacy and unfinishedness, our ontological poverty, and which ultimately makes possible our
more discursive and theoretical attitudes to being. So the dialectic of the erotic is more than dialogical, it is
Ereignis. These notions of conversation and dialogue already contain within themselves the possibility of or even
tendency towards arrogation – the establishing of a one-sidedness that comes to seem normative and through
which the hardened asymmetry of the questioner and questioned comes into being. The erot(et)ic is dialectical
inasmuch as it is a questioning. The word ‘questioning’ does not imply one-sidedness or subordination but
underscores in a non-metaphysical way the primacy of the relating over the relata.
In the work of the later Heidegger what is perhaps, from the point of view of this essay, most interesting
is the topos of the divine. This topos I suggest appears in terms of restitution, not to the gods themselves
necessarily but to being, that is, as an acknowledgment of what is owed to being by human and divine. Two
doctrines are relevant. Both underline a non-violent relation to the world; a way of being that does not “work
against Eros and…get on the wrong side of the gods” and hence does not invite further violence. 16 Both then are
expressive of an integrative and irenic movement or, in relation to modernity, counter-movement. The first is the
Geviert (the Fourfold) and the second is Gelassenheit (letting be). We might speak not only of the happening of
the Spiegel-Spiel, the mirror-play, but of the four-play of the Geviert; its free play never delivering final theory or
consummate image but only indicating how the thing is always poly-determined, never reducible to a uniformity
issuing from a ‘species’ for whom the mauvaise foi of physicalism is a chronic possibility. Being instead is
always already laid claim to by the extra-human (the always more than the subjective/objective) such that the
thing in turn always lays claim to horizons simply irreducible to theoreticisms. The thing then as not a function
of logicisms but of the ligare of logos as a gathering and uniting of heterogeneous sources of transcendence;
when Heidegger crosses out the word being he seems also to recall some of his philosophy’s earliest theological
sources where Logos is identified with chiasmus (χ). We should also notice that the crossing-out of being signals
that being is never simply the horizon that we determine or presuppose it to be; it has always already withdrawn.
The Fourfold concerns then how the thing is an instance of this chiasmatic crossing and hence the
wholeness, indeed, pleroma of being; how the thing is a centre that imparts the transcendence of its world and
gives itself as a source of the renewing and over-rich hedonological dimension of what Heidegger names the
Festive. The thing, as the Fourfold, imparts this transcendence in terms of the character of a dynamic and fecund
balance (an inner tension which is creative and irreducible to stasis and epistemicity) or in terms of what we
might call an ontological ecology. To truly appreciate ecological systems one needs to become less objectivist in
one’s thinking. To think ecologically is to become sensitive to relations, to intuit the being together of,
empirically speaking, ‘separate’ things; to see reality at the level of the whole not at the com-ponent level. When
we think in the ecological mode we enter thematically into a ‘transcendence thinking’ where to think one part of
the system is to be already referred to another part, a web of parts and so on. We become thematically aware of
the immediate penetration of the whole in all of the parts and how each part has entered into the essence of its
others. We as a result of this thematic awareness are able to get clear about the ontology of violence wherein
tampering with, suppressing or excising even the most apparently insignificant (because seemingly atomic,
discrete) part of the system is understood to be potentially devastating. We lose our facility to be indifferent to
differences, references and wholenesses, to be dismissive of the apparently marginal and to lack
conscientiousness about the unthematised; we, more over, through the ‘therapy’ of this ecological mode, with
real force gain insight into the ontology of Care. This constitutes an erotic transformation of awareness, an
awareness turned to the pursuit of wholeness and made sensitive to the excessive plenitude that saturates all
things. The Geviert grounds the thing in this sort of erotic awareness, it has a therapeutic force; it typifies a
thinking that, to respond to Aristophanes, works with Eros. Heidegger in this sense is a radically erotic thinker
and a deeply ecological or in my sense ontologically ecological one. 17
 John Augusten Nijjem 19

Gelassenheit, with its apophatic sense, even beyond Geviert, points to the ultimate
non-circumscribability and irreducibility of the accessible. The things that we know we know most when we let
be, when we acknowledge their unmitigated transcendence and the propriety of their reticence. Gelassenheit
though the name seems to suggest it, is not identifiable with concepts like apatheia, it does not imply a
resignationism or passivity but an active holding-open of self and world, a thematisation of the
non-determinedness of the Zwischen, the between, as the element of Ereignis and by extension of truth. What is
often confusing about Gelassenheit is that it subsumes the concept of activity while excising from it any sense of
not only the voluntaristic but of the subject as such. The idea of an active relation to beings and the self which
disabuses itself of, broadly speaking, representationalist, pragmatist and ‘positive-nihilist’ tendencies seems
almost incomprehensible to the ‘(post-) modern subject’, the self as extant thing. Still one wonders what other
modes of relating to things there are? Gelassenheit, however, is erotic, it concerns how things affect our way of
understanding ourselves and is thus the very opposite of the a-pathetic. Insofar as the self is a fluent,
self-interpreting being Gelassenheit signifies the acute imperative of Care, that is, the vigilance of preserving
things, the self, and the movement of their relation or being.
The Aristophanic myth speaks to a sense in us of an irretrievable integrity. It is perhaps best thought of
as a therapeutic image. It is an image which has the power to remind us of both the enigma of the erotic and the
mystery of wholeness. More over, it is an image that functions as a kind of touch stone, a reference point for
what is perhaps a latent tradition of related images that in their own way can continue to provoke thoughts in us
about our historical destinies and the contingencies of our basic self descriptions.

Notes
1
Plato, Symposium, trans. C. Gill (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 193 a-b.
2
The point is, however, that we are divested of all sense of these notions. Paideia and itinerarium no longer
make any sense in modern philosophy as carrying any epistemological or ontological force. The proto-existential
sense of pre-modern philosophy is erased by method-inflected ‘skeptogenetic’ epistemology. We can notice that
the notion of Seinsvergessenheit is partly understandable in terms of the loss of such terms as paideia and
itinerarium.
3
M. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, trans. T. Sadler (Continuum: New York, 2002), 158.
4
H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1999), 299.
5
Ibid. 362. It should be recognized that “experiences” implies more than just sensation or ‘sensibility’. It implies
the basic hermeneutical notion of self-transcendence, that is, the capacity to transcend or subvert our ‘initial
directedness’, to surpass the basic assumptions and prejudices that make possible yet at the same time threaten
always to unnecessarily delimit our understandings of beings, situations and selves.
6
Ibid. 375.
7
J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H.E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 9.
8
Plato, Symposium, trans. C. Gill (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 193 a.
9
Ibid. 203a-e. Eros, neither mortal nor immortal but the daimones who goes between these two is the child of
Plenty and Poverty. He is described thus, “Eros’ situation is like this. First of all he’s always poor…sharing his
mother’s nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father…[he’s] brave,
impetuous and intense; a formidable hunter…he desires knowledge and is resourceful…He is also in between
wisdom and ignorance.”
10
See my essay, “Fruitio Dei, Erot(et)icity and Nomination in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Salvatores Dei: Spiritual
20 Erotesis and Indeterminacy: Desiring Integrities and the Wholeness of the Self.

Exercises,” Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand) (Special Issue on Nikos Kazantzakis) 8-9
(2000-2001).
11
It is only against this sort of background that a reactionary ‘what it is like to be’ thesis, with its critique of the
‘view from nowhere’, can come to appear within the analytic tradition as an unavoidable problem that would
need to be dealt with reductivistically, begrudgingly quietistically or through some absurd non-reductivist
physicalistic sleight of hand . In a certain respect, however, this seems to place the analytic tradition - just barely
grasping even the most remote and still not-yet-quite-human conception of intentionality - tens of decades behind
its continental counterpart.
12
The ‘Technological’ I would argue is in no simple sense continuous with the ready-to-hand; nor is it a
derivative of the present-at-hand. The technological disclosure is above all articulated by a life-world more and
more sedimented with the theoretical such that the present-at-hand is more and more absorbed into its foundation
of ready-to-handness. The ready-to-hand becomes progressively articulated by the univocal and unflexible
‘things’ of technology ultimately bringing a sclerosis to what is in principle an always potentially poetic and
holistic mode of being. I would, however, acknowledge that Heidegger’s own descriptions of the ready-to-hand
from the very beginning betray to some degree a failure to phenomenologically bracket, that is, betray an
insensitivity to a language that contaminates these descriptions with technological concepts and connotations.
13
Galileo, “Il Saggiatore,” in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, ed. E. Burtt (New
York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 88.
14
The sparagmos is perhaps most famously instanced in Euripides’ The Bacchae.
15
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 20.
16
Plato, Symposium, trans. C. Gill (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 193 a-b.
17
For a discussion of the Geviert and the dimension of the ecological in Heidegger’s thought; indeed, of
Heidegger’s thought as a founding of the ecological see Julian Young’s Heidegger’s Later Philosophy.
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Young connects the Geviert to the ecological and to all intents and purposes
gives what I have called an ontological account of our usually ontic account of ecology.

References
Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999.
Heidegger, M. The Essence of Truth. Translated by T. Sadler. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row,
1977.
Heidegger, M. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
Plato. Symposium. Translated by C. Gill. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
Sartre, J.P. Being and Nothing. Translated by H.E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.
Young, J. Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
 PART II

The Erotic and Psychoanalysis

 Differential Mechanisms:
Form, Matter and Sado-Masochism

Chris L. Smith

1. Hylomorphism

When Aristotle wishes to explain what there is to know about a ‘thing’ or an ‘event’, a complete
account necessarily alludes to at least four causes: material, efficient, formal and final. Aristotle’s ‘parable of the
house’ is a consideration of the multiple factors, in the absence of which a particular house could not be built;
the stone of its composition (material), the agent responsible for that matter's manifesting its form or structure
(efficient), the blueprint followed (formal) and the purpose for which the matter was made to realize that form
(final). These four factors he terms the four causes. In cultural tectonics the term ‘function’ has been used as the
descriptor of Aristotle’s ‘final’ cause.
In De Anima, Aristotle is engaged in the exposition of his multiple causes. The relation he establishes
between the material and formal causes is extrapolated via a concept of the individual. Aristotle asserts that a
soul constitutes a “first actuality” 1 of a body and that the soul is the “substance as form of a natural body which
has life in potentiality”. 2 In depicting the soul and body in such a way, he is applying concepts drawn from a
broader conceptual framework: the hylomorphism of much of his theorizing. ‘Hylomorphism’ is the doctrine that
production is the outcome of the pressure of a transcendent form on a chaotic or passive matter. The term is a
compound word comprised of the Greek terms for matter (hulê) and shape or form (morphê). Thus, one could
describe Aristotle's view of soul and body as an instance of form and matter. He approaches the soul and body
relation as an occurrence of the more extensive relationship between parts of all things. That the soul is the form
of the body, and the body is the matter of the soul is, for Aristotle, causal.
Aristotle’s notions of form and matter, developed within the context of general laws of causation, are
habitual in one semblance or another to cultural tectonic pedagogy and practice. 3 It is the implied subservience
of matter to form that perhaps led to a privileging of another causal relation. In the pedagogies of cultural
tectonics the relations between form and function have been primal. Dictums that were delivered to the study of
biological bodies such as when Herbert Spencer said “form follows function” were quickly appropriated by
architectural theorists and became doctrine for the modern movement. Dealing with the relation between other
‘causes’ for which a house may be built was deemed anachronism along with the skills and techniques that the
efficient and material causes evoke.

2. The critique of hylomorphism

For those of us working with the abstract concrete as much as the abstractions of thought the
differentiation of form and matter made in hylomorphism occurs as an impossible operation. Architects and
biologists find themselves in a similar and curious position in this regard. Following Aristotle, both disciplines
attempt an articulation of hylomorphism in regard to the body of the ‘individual’ and both are resistant to the
proposition of Platonisms, essentialisms and animisms as a means to differentiate form and matter. Biology has
fought about the question for centuries and was perhaps best articulated in the mid 19th Century debates between
the anatomist and teleologist Georges Cuvier and the transcendental morphologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. 4
Outside of biology too cultural understandings complicate the form-matter distinction in suggesting that
individuals themselves cannot be differentiated from Others and the technologies they surround themselves with,
imbed within themselves and interact with as matters of basic survival. Indeed, it is one implication of
masochism that the victim-torturer compact is felt only through the technological extension of the body (the
whip, the boot, the stirrup, the mask): Deleuze notes that in the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch “[w]e
never see the naked body of the woman torturer; it is always wrapped in furs”. 5
The critique of hylomophism offered by Simondon also has its origins in notions of the body. Simondon
suggests that identity and the ‘individual’ should not be thought of in terms of entity but as process. Deleuze and
Guattari draw upon Simondon’s L’individu et sa genese and expound the point within A Thousand Plateaus
(1980). 6 They follow Simondon in speaking of individuation, rather than of individuals as things “posited all at
once”. 7 For Simondon individuality emerges out of something “preindividual” that continues to change and will
do so continuously. Simondon rejects both Oedipal individualism, on the one hand, and the extreme holism
which would concede existence to universality. Simondon suggests that rather than assuming states of stability
or equilibrium we should understand Being as metastable. 8
The consequences of such a view of individuation are numerous and profound. Obviously, it challenges
all those classical philosophies that assume the existence of fixed essences and substances. More subtly,
24 Differential Mechanisms:
Form, Matter and Sado-Masochism

Simondon’s arguments are directed against hylomorphism and other dualisms of form and matter. Simondon
claims that the form-matter division is never absolute. There is for him, no way to isolate one from the other and
there is no epistemological ‘gap’ between the two. For Simondon, matter is not inert, for it consistently contains
emergent structures; potentials for being formed in particular directions or by specific techniques. Likewise,
form is never absolute and never simply imposed from the outside as an ‘external act’, since it can only operate
in material by a series of transformations that relay energy, and thereby ‘inform’ matter. Deleuze and Guattari
advance the critique of hylomorphism, and follow Simondon in developing an ‘artisanal’ or non-hylomorphic
theory of production. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss this potential for material self-
ordering; as in the case of woodworking where they describe “the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers
[sic] guiding the operation of splitting wood”. 9
For Deleuze and Guattari, the production of most practitioners of cultural tectonics is insensitive to
material traits and is loathed to submit to matter. The view the designer has is that of a god or a master waiting to
‘submit’ matter to her ideas. Simondon suggests that “the hylomorphic acceptance correlates to the practice of a
person who stays outside of the workshop and only sees what enters and what exits it”. 10

3. The conceptual persona and libidinal investment

Before describing the masochist as the conceptual persona of the critique of hylomorphism it is
necessary to very briefly introduce two notions. The first is the role of the conceptual persona and the second is
the notion of libidinal investment. Both ideas were developed across the collaborative work of Deleuze and
Guattari and the notion of libidinal investment has definite origins in “Coldness and Cruelty”. 11
For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy as the practice of concept creation involves recourse to particular
characters or conceptual personae that speak in, and through, the utterances of a given philosophy:
“[C]onceptual personae are ... the true agents of enunciation” that chart the concrete and corporeal consequences
of ideas. 12 It is because a concept is incorporeal that it must be ‘incarnated’ or ‘actualised’ in bodies. 13 If the
body is that which incarnates particular thoughts, it is the conceptual persona that may be deployed in service of
particular thoughts. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari invoke the ‘nomad’ who is
aligned with a singular people or tribe rather than a universal thinking subject as a means of invoking and
investigating the concept of the war machine. For Deleuze and Guattari the conceptual persona negotiate the
territory between the corporeal and the incorporeal relation to thought, the relative and the absolute:

The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute

deterritorializations and reterritorializations. Conceptual personae are thinkers, solely thinkers,
and their personalized features are closely linked to the diagrammatic features of thought and
the intensive features of concepts. 14

The term ‘territorialization’ is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis to refer to the imprint of maternal
nurture and nourishment on the infant’s libido and the formation of part-objects and erogenous zones arising
from the connection of orifices and organs, such as the mouth-breast. 15 In Anti-Oedipus ‘deterritorialization’ in
the psychological sense indicates the freeing of the libido from imprinted objects of investment, such as the
maternal breast or the Oedipal family triangle. At the same time, but in a socio-political sense, Deleuze and
Guattari utilize the notion of ‘deterritorialization’ to describe the freeing of labour from the earth, the plot of land,
the assembly line, or other means of production. According to Eugene Holland, the concept ‘territorialization’
functions as “a kind of hinge term to connect Marx and Freud, to articulate the concepts of libido and labour-
power”. 16 It is this (to use Holland’s word) “dual-register” utilization of the notion of territorialization by which
Anti-Oedipus disseminates the field of the libidinal to include any investment of human energy. This idea is
fundamental to the explorations of A Thousand Plateaus and is one whose origins are to be found with the figure
of the masochist in “Coldness and Cruelty”, where use of the terms ‘displacement’, ‘suspense’, ‘diffusion’, de
and re- ‘sexualization’ come to signify movements of libidinal energy. For Deleuze,

the desexualization process in masochism is equally the precondition of instantaneous

resexualization, as a result of which all the passions of man, whether they concern property,
money, the State, etc., are transformed and put in the service of masochism. 17

4. The masochist as the conceptual persona

“Coldness and Cruelty” is a critique of Freud’s formulation of sadomasochism and the reiterated aim of
the essay is to establish “irreducible causal chains” for sadism and masochism. 18 Deleuze’s argument is that the
relationship between sadism and masochism is one of analogy only 19 and that “[i]n place of a dialectic which all
too readily perceives the link between opposites, we should aim for a critical and clinical appraisal able to reveal
 Chris L. Smith 25

the truly differential mechanisms”. 20 This impulse to isolate causes is not, however, one that pervades “Coldness
and Cruelty” where “the clinical specification of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary
values particular to Sade and Masoch”. 21 There is a mobile logic to the essay and it is this characteristic of
mobility by which the body of the masochist may be read as the conceptual persona of the critique of
hylomorphism.
The body of the masochist promotes a very different understanding of the form-matter relation than that
of hylomorphism. It is a body for which Aristotle’s final causes falter; it does not function, or at least not in any
biological sense. The causal relation of importance; that is, the causes that are most intensely negotiated in
masochism, are that of form and matter: The form of the masochistic technique and the matter of the body.
However, form does not arrive from a transcendent realm as an ‘external act’ but involves an infolding of both
the bodies material itself and the subsequent acts of working that material; “tie me to the chair; you may give me
thirty thrashes on the breasts and stick in the smaller pins”. 22 The libidinal investment commonly attached to
individuals and organs is at once dispersed and intensified.
I will consider four key points that connect the body of the masochist extolled in “Coldness and
Cruelty” to the critique of hylomorphism: The first relates to the idea of ‘insipid forms’, the second to the notion
of the ‘contract’, the third to the articulation of the slave-master relation suggested in both critiques and the
fourth a relation between anxiety and metastability.

A. Insipid Forms

According to Simondon’s theory, forms are developed by artisans out of suggested potentials of matter
rather than being conjured by architects and designers and imposed on a passive or chaotic matter. In artisanal
production, the artisan must ‘submit’ to matter, that is, follow its potentials by responding to its insipid forms,
and exploring techniques that liberate those potentials and actualise desired properties. Thus, form is suggested
by matter rather than imposed like the blueprint of the architect. Material, too, is neither homogenous nor
amorphous but ripe with what Deleuze and Guattari call “latent potentials”, “variable intensive affects” and
“material traits of expression”. It is these properties that suggest techniques of manipulation, manifestation and
the transformation of material. 23 But even the artisanal actualization of the virtual is not about resolution of the
metastable into stable or the pre-individual into the individuated: 24

Individuation must … be thought of as a partial and relative resolution manifested in a system

that contains latent potentials and harbours a certain incompatibility with itself, an
incompatibility due at once to forces in tension as well as the impossibility of interaction
between terms of extremely disparate dimensions. 25

In “Coldness and Cruelty”, the body of the masochist too is considered in terms of an ‘incompatibility
with itself’. For Deleuze, “[t]he body of the victim remains in a strange indeterminacy except where it receives
the blows”. 26 This ‘indeterminacy’ should not be read however in terms of the ‘passivity’ or ‘chaos’ of matter in
the hylomorphic schema. Deleuze does identify passivity with the masochist but it is not to describe the process
itself but only a stage of the process. The ‘indeterminacy’ Deleuze speaks of relates to the dispersed libido of the
masochist; the masochist’s ‘disparate dimensions’. It is a dispersal that does not articulate a form-matter division
but rather suggests the inherence of form to all the material of the body.
The masochist is replete with insipid form whose actualisation has no single ‘site’ or outlet. (If one is
isolated it is stitched up, masked or constricted.) For Deleuze; “it would seem that the contents of sadism and
masochism are each intended to fulfil a form”. 27 The body suggests not only how it wants to be worked, where
folds in the body are sown, openings tied shut and taut skin whipped, but the body as a whole is ripe with
intensities in anxious need of ‘relative resolution’. In “Coldness and Cruelty” we are reminded that Masoch
“calls this doctrine ‘supersensualism’ to indicate this cultural state of transmuted sexuality”. 28 The
supersensualism lies in the insipid forms to which matter itself defers. Though form is insipid to the masochistic
body it is still necessary to actualise the virtual. As in the critique of hylomorphism it is under the force of the
artisan’s tools that stone becomes statue and like the stone; “[t]he ascent of the human body to the work of art
and from the work of art to the Idea must take place under the shadow of the whip”. 29

B. The Contract

For Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘coherence’ of the hylomorphic schema relies on a notion of a stable and
eternal law “since laws are what submits matter to this or that form, and conversely realize in matter a given
property deduced from the form”. 30 It is law itself that is problematic. Anti-Oedipus was written very much as an
attack against law, structures and hierarchies of any kind. In attacking Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari are only
partially concerned with criticising Freud's theory of the centrality of the Oedipus complex to psychology. Their
26 Differential Mechanisms:
Form, Matter and Sado-Masochism

actual target is the fable of the inevitability of eternal laws, hierarchy and authority. Oedipus is the conceptual
persona for numerous ‘micro-fascisms' acquired through uncritical participation in the habit of law and the
fictions it propagates.
According to Deleuze the earlier association of the body with the law (“the moral criteria of judgment”)
is no longer practicable, as the body-construct that speaks juridical language is largely abandoned. 31 In response,
“the intellectual or writer becomes adept at speaking the language of life, rather than of law”. 32 This new subject
endeavours to expand the occurrence of exteriority and to create a language that collaborates with forces that
enter from “the outside”, interrupting the habits of normality and exposing the violence and eroticism which
accompanies the construction of identity. 33 For Deleuze and Guattari the artisanal approach to the form-matter
relation implies:

“a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting

operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is
less a matter submitting to laws that a materiality possessing a nomos.” 34

The notion of the law developed within “Coldness and Cruelty” is also described as form itself:
“Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure form, without substance or object or any determination whatsoever,
is such that no one knows nor can know what it is”. 35 That is, Deleuze is attacking not only for a law whose
‘eternity’ is temporal but a law that is extensional across all material; a law of form that may be applied to all
matter. In difference to an eternal law, masochism takes the ‘contract’ as its “ideal form … and its necessary
precondition”. 36
The difference between the law and the contract is that the contract surfaces in response to very
particular needs and specific situations. 37 It exists between consensual parties for a given period and relates to
specific boundaries. That is, there is a contingency to the contract that pre-empts specific causal chains; ‘if’ x
happens ‘then’ y; “if I should mutilate you, you shall bear it without complaint”. 38 The contract precedes the
‘law’ and is like the statement that precedes meaning or a meaning that precedes judgement. The necessity of the
contract to masochism means that pain is not itself causal but is “regarded as an effect only”. 39 Deleuze suggests
that the masochist attempts, however, to derive law from the contract. 40 Yet for Deleuze, the masochists
adherence to law is only a demonstration of its absurdity: “(thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an
erection, provokes and ensures it)”. 41
The masochist, of “Coldness and Cruelty”, is the ‘educator’ and ‘persuader’ and establishes the contract
to ensure firstly that the body is worked in particular ways, and secondly as an engagement with the torturer. It is
the cultural tie that operates much like the grain of wood in suggesting and pre-empting a type of relation
between the material worked and an artisan. 42

C. The Slave-Master Relation

The slave-master relation is one that Simondon centres on in the critique of hylomorphism and that
Deleuze cannot but avoid in the critique of sadomasochism. However, the slave-master relation that Simondon
suggests of the hylomorphic form-matter relation is distinctly different to the relation established between the
victim-torturer of masochism.
Simondon suggests that the view of hylomorphism is not merely the viewpoint of a person ‘outside a
workshop’ but that of a master who commands the labour of slaves. According to Simondon, “[w]hat
hylomorphism primarily reflects is a social representation of labour … in essence the labour commanded by the
free man and conducted by the slave”. 43 Deleuze and Guattari follow Simondon in analyzing this political
significance of hylomorphism. 44 For them, hylomorphism also has an important dimension; as a representation
of a politic in which the State descends to liberate a populace from turmoil by an imposition of order. Deleuze
and Guattari follow Simondon in analyzing this political significance of hylomorphism and suggest that the idea
of hylomorphism is linked to the idea of the State, which descends from above or beyond to liberate a populace
from chaos (internal strife) or passivity (economic lethargy) by an imposition of order. In the terminology of
Deleuze and Guattari; the matter of a society, its assemblages and territorialities (its micro-politics), become the
material for the striations (the ordering and appropriation) of the State. The form-matter division of
hylomorphism expressed by Simondon as the slave-master relation is translated in A Thousand Plateaus as the
State-micro division.
In “Coldness and Cruelty” the contract that suggests the working of the body of the victim also
promotes the engagement of another body; that of the torturer. For Deleuze, the contract’s “paradoxical
intention … involves a master-slave relationship, and one further in which the woman is the master and
torturer”. 45 However, the incorporation of the torturer into masochism that Deleuze articulates ensures that there
is no imposition from above as it is in the hylomorphic schema. It is the victim that engages the torturer and thus
the contract ensures that the slave-master relation is not dialectic and based on an absolute resolution or Hegelian
 Chris L. Smith 27

synthesis but is rather for the intensification and prolongation of the masochistic event. Deleuze suggests that the
torturer is the masochistic element; another zone of the dispersed libido of masochism:

We are no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the
more because she is unconsenting and unpersuaded. We are dealing instead with a victim in
search of a torturer and who needs to educate, persuade and conclude an alliance with the
torturer in order to realize the strangest of schemes. 46

This slave-master relation is one that is negotiated within masochism and not delivered blow by blow
from the sadist (or the State).

D. Anxiety as a Metastable State

Contrary to the idea of equilibrium implied by hylomorphism, for Simondon and Deleuze and Guattari,
nothing is stable. For them everything exists as metastability. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
suggest that in addition to the denial of the insipid forms of matter (“wood that is more or less porous, more or
less elastic” 47 ) hylomorphism negates “an entire energetic materiality in movement.” 48 This is a critique not
only of the belief that mediations or ‘syntheses’ of causes result in stable bodies, but all dualisms that are based
on notions of equilibrium are called into question; order and disorder, passivity and chaos, development and
deterioration etc. For Simondon metastability is not an absolute resolution based on a notion of equilibrium but
rather a relative resolution, or plateaux of libidinal intensity.
Again, this is a notion found in critique of Freud’s clinical resolution of sadism and masochism.
According to Deleuze, Masoch “finds in works of art the source and inspiration of his loves”. 49 The point of
connection between the work of art and the body is not one of analogy (like the connection between sadism and
masochism itself) but one that is better understood in terms of that which is “cold-maternal-severe”. 50 In the
plastic arts Deleuze identifies a suspension of gesture and attitude. 51 There is an anxiety in matter that takes form
as other things and paradoxically an immobility that is like the immobility of the masochist and anxiety of
“arrested movement”. 52 Coldness in this respect is not a ‘zero degree’ of equilibrium but the colder than cold
‘absolute zero’ of suspension. 53 The contract which actuates an intense stability of the torturer; as when she
“freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a photograph”, 54 likewise actualises on the
surface of the victim another relative resolution; a metastability.
The lack of an absolute resolution or synthesis of the victim-torturer relation in “Coldness and Cruelty”
is not the lack of a relative resolution. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari extend the notion of the
libidinal plateaux of masochism in consideration of what they refer to as a body without organs (BwO). They
suggest that the body of the masochist becomes a zone of intensity that is not organised or ordered in a manner
that privileges specific sites of intensity as where the libido is deterritorialized from the organs in which it is
habitually invested and resolved. In this regard Deleuze and Guattari quote Artaud; “for you can tie me up if you
wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ”. 55
The body of the masochist has as its goal a perpetual anxious state which is itself metastable. The
masochist is not tied so that movement is impossible. On the contrary, the tying is for the actualisation of
movement. For Deleuze “[f]ormally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting” and the resolution of this state is
both secondary and relative. 56 The movement of masochistic libido is achieved in anxiety and interruption and
not in its resolution. 57 The gap of ‘interrupted love’ is not between form and matter but the interruption that is
inherent to the masochistic form itself. Likewise, the sowing up of the orifices and the constriction of the phallus
of the masochist is not like the ‘neutralisation’ (or loss of the phallus) in Freud’s description of fetishism, but
rather the engagement of the whole matter of the body by the dispersal of libido. That is the body is not
‘organised’ in the habitual manner (by an account of organs) so that it may be negotiated in new and intense
ways without absolute resolution. It is in anxiety that the masochist occurs as the perpetual preindividual.

5. Conclusion

Whilst masochism and the critique of hylomorphism remain differential mechanisms, the figure of
masochist is very much the conceptual persona of artisanal production. The personalized features of the
masochist; the forms implied by his flesh, his contract, his torturer, his anxiety; are tightly bound to the
diagrammatic features of the critique of hylomorphism; its notion of insipid form, its relation to law, its slave-
master account and its metastability; respectively. The masochist is very much a construct that operates inside
cultural tectonics and not ‘outside the workshop’.
28 Differential Mechanisms:
Form, Matter and Sado-Masochism

Notes

1 Aristotle, De Anima, ii 1, 412b5-6, trans. D. W. Hamlyn, Aristotle: De Anima Books II and III (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993).
2 Aristotle, ii 1, 412a20-1; and similarly, that it “is a first actuality of a natural body which has life in
potentiality”; Aristotle, De Anima ii 1, 412a27-8.
3 Martha C. Nussbaum & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (London: Oxford University
Press, 1995), Chapter 4: Hylomorphism and Functionalism.
4 Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier- Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
5 Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil from “Le Froid and le Cruel” in
Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit, 1967) (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 26.
6 Deleuze and Guattari cite Simondon’s major works, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique and Du mode
d’existence des objets techniques in several crucial instances in “1227: Treatise on Nomodology: The War
Machine”; Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 457 n28, 555 n33 and 508/408; trans. Brian Massumi from Mille plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et
schizophrénie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980).
Little has been written in English about Simondon, although there is a translation of the Introduction to ‘The
Genesis of the Individual’; Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan
Crary & Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992). Refer also to Gilles Deleuze, “Review of Gilbert
Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1966),” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12
(2001): 43-9; trans. Ivan Ramirez from Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 156 (1966): 115-8.
7 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy (New York – Chichester: Columbia University Press,
1994), 22. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1991).
8 Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 301-2.
9 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 408.
10 Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 40.
11 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 118 (for instance).
12 Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy, 65.
13 Ibid., 21.
14 Ibid., 69.
15 Jacques Lacan, The FourFundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1981); trans. Alan Sheridan.
16 Eugene W. Holland, “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’,” SubStance 66 (1991): 57. Holland explains by
way of example of territorialization both in the psychoanalytic form, as above, and in terms of land and labour
territorialization.
17 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 118.
18 Ibid., 14.
19 Ibid., 46.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Ibid., 14.
22 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150.
23 Ibid., 408.
24 Ibid., 408.
25 Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 300. (My italics).
26 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 26.
27 Ibid., 74.
28 Ibid., 69.
29 Ibid., 22.
30 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 408.
31 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 162. Trans.
Daniel Smith & Michael Greco from Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993).
32 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 91. Trans. Sean
Hand from Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986).
33 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 378.
34 Ibid., 408.
35 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 83
36 Ibid., 75.
37 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 63.
 Chris L. Smith 29

38 Wanda Sacher-Masoch, “Contract between Wanda and Sacher-Masoch,” in Masochism, 278.

39 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 121.
40 Ibid., 91.
41 Ibid., 88.
42 Ibid., 19.
43 Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, 48 and 49.
44 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 410-8.
45 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 92.
46 Ibid., 20.
47 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 408.
48 Ibid., 408.
49 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 69.
50 Ibid., 51.
51 Ibid., 70.
52 Ibid., 70.
53 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 154.
54 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 33.
55 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150
56 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 71.
57 Ibid., 93.

References
Appel, Toby A. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987.
Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by Hamlyn, D. W. Aristotle: De Anima Books II and III. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Translated by Sean
Hand from Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Coldness and Cruelty.” In Masochism. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Translated by Jean
McNeil from “Le Froid and le Cruel” in Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Translated by
Daniel Smith & Michael Greco from Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1966).” Pli: The
Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12 (2001): 43-49. Translated by Ivan Ramirez from Revue Philosophique de
la France et de l’Etranger 156 (1966): 115-118.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Translated by Brian Massumi from Mille plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit, 1980.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy. New York – Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell from Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. Paris: Les Editions
de Minuit, 1991.
Holland, Eugene W. “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’.” SubStance 66 (1991).
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1981. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
Nussbaum, Martha C. & Oksenberg Rorty, Amélie. Essays on Aristotle's De Anima. London: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Sacher-Masoch, Wanda. “Contract between Wanda and Sacher-Masoch.” In Masochism. New York: Zone
Books, 1989.
Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Millon, 1995.
30 Differential Mechanisms:
Form, Matter and Sado-Masochism

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary & Sanford
Kwinter. New York: Zone, 1992.
 Dr. Love And Mr. Death

Andrew Feldmár

“I haven’t got a chart

to get me to the Heart
of this or any other matter.”
[Leonard Cohen]

Speculation is in and of itself erotic. Paul Goodman wrote that when he had first read in Freud,
“Dreams are the Royal Road to the unconscious,” he instantly found himself with an erection. Freud, by the way,
noted that in the realm of the erotic, one had trouble getting to the truth, for people lied when it came to
discussing sexual matters. Goodman’s honesty requires courage. He takes the risk of being thought outrageous
when he speaks the normally unspeakable.
We are motivated to lie, even to ourselves, when we don’t think our truths are good enough. So it is
fundamental to realize that desiring is not in itself doing anyone any harm. R. D. Laing expressed this well in an
interview: “I’ve got a general philosophy of harmlessness. I think it’s a good idea that other people don’t do me
any harm. I don’t like people doing other people in, against their will, in a really vicious, nasty way, for sheer
spite, malice or self-indulgence. I don’t like that happening, whether it’s men and women, women and women,
men and men. Nothing to do with sex, that. It’s a general idea of live and let live. If we wish to turn our sex life
into a Genet-ian scene by consent, dramatizing between ourselves some sort of delight or pleasure, by together
making our bodies the occasion of some Absurd or Surrealist Theatre – then I don’t feel any desire to stop
anyone doing that. And if I feel like doing that, I don’t feel like anyone’s got a right to stop me doing that with
someone else who feels like doing that with me. But not damaging another human being for the sake of pleasure
and the power there is in being able to damage, the pleasure in being able to harm…” As it is said in S&M
circles, “Nobody likes to play with a real Sadist!”
Erotica celebrates equals-in-pleasure, sharing, while pornography demands exploitation of some kind, it
degrades, turns people into objects. A mother’s relationship with her baby could be erotic or pornographic. I
prefer to be played with, to being toyed with. It makes a big difference. Jack Morin in The Erotic Mind states,
“The universal challenges of early life provide the building blocks for adult arousal.”
Thirty years ago, I was standing beside my wife, holding onto her hand, as she was pushing and
swearing and slowly giving birth to our first child. At the moment the baby was crowning, I saw a small patch of
wet, dark-brown hair. Unexpectedly and with unprecedented power, my heart felt pierced, my breath left me, and
I was sobbing uncontrollably. Tears were washing my face. I felt seized by a superior force. This seizure
repeated itself later, when through a window, I was allowed to look at my son who was squirming in the hands of
a stranger in the nursery. This time, along with all the unruly emotions, I had a thought: “If anything were to
happen to my baby, if he died or even hurt himself, I would die!” The area of the surface of my vulnerability had
just doubled. For the first time in my memory, I felt connected, one with another, for better or worse. I did not
realize it then, but in that moment I ceased to exist as I had been: alone and free. Faced with my son, I
immediately became his hostage, and replacing freedom, I was overtaken with responsibility. I felt smitten and
shaky. There was no decision to be made by me, I felt precipitated into a new state of consciousness.
Cupid’s arrow through the heart, involuntary enslavement, death and rebirth: these are the symptoms of
losing one’s usual boundaries, of falling in love. My newborn’s innocence penetrated all the accumulated crust
of defenses around my heart. The joy of that first Hello already contained the sting of the last Good-by. Before
that epiphany, I was standing there, the hero, well armored; after that moment I felt naked and as open to the
elements, as vulnerable, as was my baby. My armor protected me from wounds, but also from the depths that can
open up in oneself when the other is allowed to penetrate within. My sense of isolated self gave way to a lived
sense of us of which I was a part.
In D. M. Thomas’s Big Deaths, Little Deaths, sex becomes an expression of bewildered anger, a violent
revenge for the death of a loved one. We are related, connected and separated at the same time. Sex and violence
can delay the excruciating pain of grieving and mourning for all that we are continuously losing.
Each of us has started out inside another (mother). My father’s sperm and my mother’s egg died into the
zygote that was the single first cell, from which I grew. Immediately, I began dividing and growing. As a
blastula, a spherical ball of identical cells, I made my journey down my mother’s fallopian tube and entered her
womb. There, I had to find a place to implant. The lining of her womb may or may not have been inviting and
welcoming, but I am living proof that I managed to burrow my way in. The lining covered me over, and I began
to grow in a differentiated way: now I could grow my head, feet, umbilical cord, placenta, liver and skin. Once a
wandering nomad, I settled down and let my roots take hold. For nine, subjectively everlasting, months I lived
32 Andrew Feldmár

like a parasite in my mother’s womb. I took all my nourishment from her and I eliminated all my wastes into her.
I was contained and she was my container.
There is no organism without an environment. Each affects the other, continuously, always, and forever.
As soon as my father’s sperm entered my mother’s ovum, and I came into being in the form of a zygote, I found
myself in an environment. My mother’s fallopian tube might have been nourishing, could have been poisonous,
or neutral. A little over a week later, having morphed into a blastula, negotiating entry into my mother’s
endometrium, the blood-rich mucus membrane lining her uterus, my implantation could have felt like being
welcomed with a crimson bed of joy, awaiting the weary traveler, or it may have been more like a D-day
invasion, opposed by heavy artillery. I believe that an organism, even a single cell, remembers the nature of
these encounters with subsequent environments. Expectations are set up, tensions are produced, and defenses are
constructed.
Whether I would expect to feel welcome in a new environment or not, may depend on my history of
past encounters. Whether I would expect nourishment or a fight for survival may depend on past generosities or
hostilities I have negotiated. Even a trace of resentment or reluctance might poison the nourishment that is made
available for me. The shame and humiliation of being needy and dependent on a reluctant caretaker can generate
rage, revenge, violence, depression or hatred.
My self-image included, while living in the womb, the placenta, the umbilical cord and the fetus. Every
cell in these three parts carried my genetic signature, whereas every cell other than these three parts around me
carried my mother’s genetic signature. And then it was time for the big separation. Birth cost me the loss of my
environment and half of myself, by weight. I lost the womb, with all its sounds and textures and ambiance, and
my placenta and umbilicus were amputated. An exile, a crippled immigrant, I met my folks on the outside.
Intercourse continues, if all goes well, between mother’s breast and baby’s mouth, blood replaced by
milk, a highly sensuous and exciting exchange, repeated six or more times a day, for well over a year, if lucky.
The mother’s attitude toward the wet and messy interfaces of baby/world (mouth, anus, urethra) may influence
our later attitudes toward the wetness and messiness of adult sexuality.
Nándor Fodor, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, in 1949, published a book entitled The Search for the
Beloved: A clinical investigation of the trauma of birth and pre-natal conditioning. In it, he wrote that “life is a
continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” The legend of the Fall of Man, Fodor suggests, is
a record of our biological origin. He writes, “our last contact with God was within the womb, at the time of
conception.” Be that as it may, the title of Fodor’s book refers to his belief that we experience our placenta as our
very first lover and sexual partner, whom we yearn after and seek, throughout our entire lifetime, after the brutal
separation and loss that we suffer at birth.
The myth of Isis and Osiris, like the legend of the Fall, seems to contain information from humanity’s
common origin, the womb. Isis and Osiris were twins conceived in the belly of the Sky Goddess, Nut. The two
became lovers before they were born. When they became adults, they were married. Later, Seth, brother of Isis,
murdered Osiris and tore the corpse into many pieces, which he flung and scattered over the Earth. Isis then
discovered, collected and reunited the pieces of her dead husband’s body. She was the chief mourner at his
funeral, and through her divine love and power brought Osiris back to life again.
Could this ancient story have been inspired by the pattern of blood flow between fetus and placenta
through the umbilical cord, driven by the fetal heart-beat to repeat, over and over, millions of times? Here is the
cycle: blood ejaculates from fetus into placenta via the single artery in the cord; blood-vessels split, branch into
smaller and smaller capillaries, until the tired blood gets spread all over the large surface of the placenta; fresh
blood, filled with oxygen and nutrients begins to collect in tiny capillaries that add up to larger tributaries that
eventually flow into the two veins that wind their way back to the fetus through the cord, ejaculating into and
through the navel. Fetus and placenta, locked in eternal intercourse, each being penetrated and penetrating in
turn.
Mapping Isis onto the veins, Seth onto the artery, and Osiris onto the fetal blood supply, illuminates the
commonality of an ancient myth and a biological reality.
Let me remind you of Aristophanes’ statements in Plato’s Symposium. His speech, in praise of Eros,
concludes with: “Love is the desire and pursuit of the whole.” Aristophanes says that at the beginning all humans
were kind of spherical beings rolling around happily. Each had four legs, four arms, two heads facing in opposite
directions, and two sets of genitals, also pointing in opposite directions. Some were male/male, some
female/female, and some male/female. These proto-humans came to the attention of the Gods, who decided to
keep them in their place by cutting each being in half. As you can guess, from that moment on there were a lot of
two-legged, two-armed, single-genitaled creatures rushing about, desperately looking for their lost half. Notice
how this story puts homo- and hetero- sexuality on a par. This “just so” story and the notion that after birth we
are forever searching for the beloved, seem to come from the same intuition both Plato and Nándor Fodor tuned
into, though hundreds of years apart.
Our word for intercourse, sex, comes from a Latin root meaning to cut or sever. Nexus means to
connect, so why, when we make love, do we have sex and not nex? Robert Stoller in Sexual Excitement:
 Dr. Love And Mr. Death 33

Dynamics of Erotic Life concludes, “It is hostility -- the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person -- that
generates and enhances sexual excitement. The absence of hostility leads to sexual indifference and boredom.
The hostility of erotism is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo childhood traumas and frustrations that
threatened the development of one’s masculinity or femininity.” A trauma that threatened one’s existence,
regardless of gender, was birth. Separation. Parturition. Stanislav Grof named the four phases of birth: Bliss
Inside (fetus still has sufficient room, oxygen and nourishment); No Exit (tight fit, contractions create pressure,
cervix undilated, nowhere to go); Bloody Battle (do or die, friction of struggling through dilated cervix); Bliss
Outside (escape from pressure, relief, fresh source of oxygen and food, room to move again). Notice that the
sequence of experiences constituting sexual arousal and orgasm echoes or mimics the birth sequence: the rise of
desire from contentment and its eventual satisfaction through mounting arousal and tension to eventual orgasmic
release follows the above pattern. Also, note that the phenomenology of both No Exit and Bloody Battle include
rage and hostility. The desire for survival, the more survival is threatened, the more ruthless it becomes. Desire
per se is ruthless. Love, ruth, mitigates this ruthlessness but doesn’t always overcome it.
“A life contracts death already and birth still in the spasms of the orgasmic chiasm,” Alphonso Lingis
writes, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty. “Nietzsche identifies the inner sensation of life with exultation and not with
contentment – life is the feeling of gratuitously expanding force within, not the feeling of the filling of hunger,
an emptiness being compensated for with a content,” Lingis continues. For Sartre human relations consisted in
loving and desiring alternately. Devotion to the subjectivity of another is love; sexual desire is the concrete form
of every project to possess that subjectivity. The presence of one fades out the other.
And then there is communion, or co-presence. Two can dance together in such a way that neither leads,
neither follows, but miraculously both feel moved by something greater than either of them. The music dances
them; they both surrender to it, not to each other. String quartets at times manage to play as if the four musicians
were one. There are magic moments when the players, the music, the composer, the audience, all feel as one.
There is a sense of participation, rejuvenation and bliss.
Coomaraswamy in his Metaphysics is eloquent in showing how East and West spin similar metaphors
to point to communion. Participation implies love and vice versa, since a love that does not participate in the
beloved is by no means love, but rather desire. In the Vedas there is a prayer to be said at dawn: “May we be
associated in participation!” In erotic parlance, to be slain and to be in gloria are one and the same thing.
Marriage is assimilation, and to be assimilated is to die. The soul (which must as Meister Eckhart says, “put
itself to death”) is to be thought of as the Bride of Christ.
Eckhart writes, “The soul, in hot pursuit of God, becomes absorbed in Him… just as the sun will
swallow up and put out the dawn.” This expresses the relationship of the Spirit to the soul. What a dangerous
maneuver it is to get close to the Other: how not to be swallowed up, how not to be annihilated by the Other?
How not to swallow up, annihilate the Other? And yet, how to allow oneself to be assimilated, how to surrender
to what is between self and Other?
James Keyes wrote, “The meaning of marriage, as I now see, is that two people become so addicted to
each other that they cannot live happily, or even live at all, apart. The addiction, each equally for the other, is
their total security, and each renews and redoubles the strength of the other through an ecstatic exchange of
benefits as long as they both live.” He wrote this in 1972, when the notion of co-dependence wasn’t in fashion
yet. Change the word addiction to devotion and read the passage again. What foolish daring! What dangerous
inter-dependence!
In many mythologies Sun and Moon, Breath and Substance, Soul and Christ are married, progenitive
pairs. There are inseparable connections between initiation, marriage, death, and alimentary assimilation. The
word marriage itself seems to contain mer (Sanskrit mr to die); many words, in sacred texts used to denote the
unification of the many in the one, imply both death and marriage (the Greek teleo, for instance, means to be
perfected, to be married, or to die).
In the I Ching, Trigram 61, Inner Truth, cautions against dependence on inner accord with one’s
beloved. Dependence upon inner accord jeopardizes inner truth. R. D. Laing said, “Do not depend for safety on
feeling safe in the safest embrace. The sweetest thing in all the world (and one of the most dangerous) is to love
and to be loved in return.”
To love the other is to see the other as the other is, whether or not this is how the other needs to be seen,
and regardless of my need to see him or her differently. To love myself is to love me as I am, not as I feel I need
to be in order to be loved. Laing wrote, “All alteration of self, of other, making self and other other than we are
is deception, not true love.” Later he added, “Terror of each other spells the extinction of each other.
Communion is mutual extinction of mutual terror. Communion: joy in, celebration of our co-existence in this
world we share, co-presence, our beings being together in the most intimate, in all possible, spiritual, mental and
physical ways, completely. Our only sustainable existence is through co-existence. The culmination, fulfillment,
realization of, the perfection of existence is co-existence, co-presence: healthy, holy communion. This is our
hope, our only sustaining hope of deliverance from our body of death, death’s body.”
34 Andrew Feldmár

What are the risks of opening oneself to the possibility of sexual communion? One risk is that it might
just be an illusion. I could be betrayed or I might betray. “To know the other, and to be known, in the Biblical
sense, through communion-in-sex, is possible, I think.” R. D. Laing continues, “Why go to such lengths to avoid
it? We may miss or avoid this possibility by faking it, hardening our hearts against it, by repudiating it, or,
tragically, despite our yearning for it, it may never come our way. Nevertheless, I believe sexual communion to
be a possible actuality, one of the most precious, sweetest, feared, envied, dreaded, hated, hazardous possibilities
in life.”
Joanna Frueh, in her book Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love, notes, “People believe they
don’t deserve sweetness. Pleasure is apparently gratuitous. One must persuade them to pleasure. Sweet, related to
Latin suadere, ‘to persuade,’ and suavis, ‘sweet.’ Pleasure and Eros are the sweetness of life, with which one
does not have to have a harassed relation and without which one easily grows grim and unforgiving. Pleasure is a
necessary luxury, for it is the fat of education, the finest, richest part.”
Sex is the mysterious mixture of separation-anxiety, rage, yearning, love, play, sensuous pleasure,
delicate pain, fear, trembling, hunger, generosity, desperate clinging, free letting go, and one could go on and on.
Erotic excitement unleashes lust and desire, which crave to get in touch with, penetrate the animal body of the
decorously separate other. This wildness is not violent though, it doesn’t want to tear the other’s eyes out. Lingis
writes, “sexual attraction is so like trust: it careens toward sexual surrender to another as into an ultimate trust...
Trust is courageous, giddy, and lustful.”
We all want connection. Connection that doesn’t have to be paid for by loss of autonomy, by
subjugation, by exploitation, by submission to domination. Connection that makes one freer, not less free.
Disconnection engenders pain and unmitigated agency (selfishly fending for oneself only) leads to death. I will
close with a quote from David Bakan’s The Duality of Human Existence: “The proper way of dying is from
fatigue after a life of trying to mitigate agency with communion.”
 PART III

The Erotic in Language

 Comparative or Intensifying Words

Alphonso Lingis

1. Acting like an Animal

When a man or a woman uses violence to get sexual satisfaction, when he or she rapes another human, it is
commonly said “He or she acts like an animal”.
Human males are on average twenty percent greater in size than females, but there is no reason to think that
it is natural for them to use their greater size and musculature to forcibly subdue females for their sexual pleasure.
Rape is not the norm in nature. Among the other animal species, females select their sexual partners, males display
themselves in courtship. Elaborate and fantastic courtship behaviours have been much documented among jewelfish,
whitefish, stickleback, cichlids, and guppies, among fruit flies, fireflies, cockroaches and spiders, among crabs,
among mountain sheep, antelopes, elk, lions, and sea lions, and among emperor penguins, ostriches, cranes,
pheasants, and hummingbirds.
Biologists after Darwin have taken as their fundamental explanatory axiom that to multiply one's own genes
is the single evolutionary imperative. In natural selection, success means success in reproduction. Males and females
have conflicting interests. The number of offspring a female may have is limited; her biological interest is to
copulate with a male of exceptional survival capacity physically strong, and capable, through camouflage or
alertness, to escape predators. Whereas a male has an interest in breeding with a large number of high-quality
females.
But Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection for the survival of the fittest does not dominate in the
courtship behaviours of jewelfish and guppies, fruit flies and cockroaches, crabs, mountain sheep and sea lions,
emperor penguins and hummingbirds. He recognized then a sexual selection which pulls in the opposite direction
from ordinary natural selection. Whereas natural selection for the survival of the fittest tends to make individuals
inconspicuous, conservative of energy, and streamlined for more effective action, sexual selection promotes brilliant
raiment, extravagant adornments, noisy and conspicuous behaviour, all of which consume a great deal of energy and
make individual males vulnerable. Biologist R. A. Fisher described this as a runaway process: The only advantage
the ostentatious male crabs with one huge red non-functional claw, peacocks with their extravagant tails and birds of
paradise with their fantastical and brilliantly coloured plumage have is the fact that females consider them attractive.
Since such males pass on the show-off character to their offspring, those offspring will show off and will be
attractive to females too. Thus females lose by having offspring who waste resources on showing off.
Intrigued by my reading in biology about three years ago, I realized that any thinking about it would require
empirical experience, so I purchased a pair of grey peacock pheasants, a species of small pheasants native to the
Indochinese peninsula. Although their grey plumage camouflages them very effectively in the shady underbrush of
the jungle where they live, the male has spots of iridescent aquamarine all over his body, the female spots of
iridescent ruby-red, which glitter like mirrors in the sun. Since it was winter I put them in my glassed in and heated
porch. For some days in this quite strange and unnatural environment, they were quiet and wary. Then one evening I
happened to look up from my reading of Darwin, and saw the male had spread his tail into a circular fan, extending
the circle with his outspread and lowered wings, and, holding his head bowed to the ground, was performing a dance
before the female. The words “He knows he's gorgeous” came spontaneously into my mind. When I realized what I
had said, I immediately heard the reaction of contemporary behaviourist ethologists: “Posh! What romanticism,
what anthropomorphism.” Yet what other explanation could one invent before this spectacle than: He knows he's
gorgeous.
Last December, on the Woolomoloo University campus in Australia, not three feet off the sidewalk in a thin
bush, I came upon a satin bowerbird. His eyes bright blue, his black plumage glistened with tints of violet, purple,
and cobalt. He had cleared a patch of ground some twenty feet in diameter of every tiny twig, stem, leaf, and root.
He had then covered the cleared area with a mat woven of coarse grasses and twigs. He had then built two parallel
vertical walls of twigs about 5 inches apart set in a north-south direction. The walls were about 12 inches high and 4
inches thick, arranged to arch over into a bower. He had painted the inside walls of his bower bright blue with the
juice of berries. On the display stage in front of the northern entrance of the bower he had placed his collection of
objets d'art. He had travelled far and wide to bring back blue parrot feathers, blue flowers, blue berries, blue beetles,
fragments of blue glass, pieces of blue crockery, blue buttons. From the campus cafeteria he had collected a large
number of bright blue plastic drinking straws. This was the theatre the bird had constructed for his courtship dance.
38 Comparative or Intensifying Words

Females visit bower after bower and watch the males dance until they finally select the one to whom to give their
sexual favours. As I watched he was carefully checking over his collected objects. Those that had lost their colour
during the night, flowers wilted or berries shrivelled, he picked up and discarded on a garbage dump, far from the
stage. I was told later by a professor that this bird had maintained this theatre on the side of the sidewalk on the
campus for seventeen years now.
I learned, from this professor who had gone far and wide to visit all the species of bowerbird that live in
Australia, that the Lauterbach's bowerbird weaves thousands of small pebbles into the walls of his avenue, and also
builds transverse walls on each end of his bower. He collects red and pale grey objects, placing them in separate
areas inside his bower. The fawn-breasted bowerbird collects pale green berries and places them directly in front of
the bower and also on the inner walls. The great grey bowerbird places a huge pile of white objects directly in front
of the avenue and pale green objects on either side of the white ones; later I myself saw such a bower, near Uluru in
central Australia. The professor had found the display stage of one bird to contain over a thousand small white
bones, and also white pebbles and stones, and white snail shells. When the bird can collect pieces of green glass,
these are laid out at the bower entrance and inside the bower; he dances in their glitter. But individual bowerbirds
can have very different preferences for colours.
The Queensland gardener, a bird but nine and a half inches long, builds twin pyramidal constructions up to
nine feet high with a bridge connecting them, and decorates the inner walls with pale moss, lichens, ferns, flowers,
and bunches of berries. The flowers are all placed upright. W. S. Day turned one of the bird's orchids upside down.
Upon his return, the bird made a great fuss and noise, and replaced the flower in its proper position. Day repeated
the operation the next day, and the flower was again placed upright. The Striped Gardener packs twigs with moss
about the trunk of a sapling. About this “Maypole,” he constructs a dome-shaped pavilion two or three feet in
diameter. The pavilion is cemented waterproof, and covered with living orchids. On its floor, covered with a mat
made of blackish fibres from the trunks of tree ferns, he arranges bright yellow flowers, many scarlet and bright blue
berries, yellowish green leaves, and mauve-coloured beetles. The Vogelkop bowerbird builds a dome-shaped
papillon eight feet long, six feet wide, and four and a half feet high. In front of the pavilion there is a garden of moss,
upon which flowers and fruits are placed. S. Dillon Ripley dropped on this garden a pinkish begonia, small yellow
flowers, and a pretty red orchid. Upon his return the owner promptly threw aside the yellow flowers. After some
hesitation and a good many nods and looks and flicks of the tail, the begonia was also cast away. Perplexed by the
red orchid blossom, the gardener took it from one of his piles of fruits or flowers to another, trying to find one that it
matched. Finally, with many flourishes, he laid it on top of some pink flowers.
Beauty we have so identified this value as our own, in so many cultures placing artists higher than political
leaders and thinkers, even higher than priests. Yet this absorption in beauty, this appreciation of beauty, this longing
for beauty has so eluded our understanding. Our philosophy of mind, our psychology, our neurology have not been
able to say what this attention to beauty is, what evolution produced it, what education produces it. Those who have
even said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it is our eyes and our eyes alone that make things beautiful,
have to recognize that it is not the faculty that we identify as specifically human that makes and appreciates beauty.
Yet beauty is a word that everyone understands. There is no ascetic laboratory scientist, no inner-city street
kid, no Hell's Angel, no depraved sociopath who is not captivated by human beauty. The sense of beauty does
indeed seem integral to our nature. In one another's bodies and in the bodies of other animals, in trees, in glacier-
streaming mountains and verdant river valleys, in machines and in deserts, in orchestras, drums, reed pipes,
birdsong, in words chanted, murmured, or whispered, in oceans and in the dawning skies everywhere we look we are
on the lookout for beauty.
Humans admire the beauty of birds, but birds do also. Darwin understood that the mountain sheep evolved
their huge inward coiling horns, coral fish their intricate designs, hummingbirds their scintillating colours because in
courtship songs and rituals the females select the more spectacular mates. The fascination with form and colour is
something we share with other species, something that Nature produced in us in evolving our from other species.
Not long ago we still graded evolution, spoke of lower and higher species, gave ourselves the highest grade
for our brains. We now recognize that natural evolution is not teleologically destined to the evolution of the human
species. It is hard to view the exuberant inventiveness of design and colour in flowers, of form and hue in seashells
without thinking that the drive toward beauty is everywhere in Nature. The pearl oyster elaborates the iridescent
colours of its inner shell without seeing them; humans have evolved to be able to wonder over it and wonder over
the nature of beauty and of our longing for beauty.
 Alphonso Lingis 39

2. Glamour

The human primates lost the ostentatious hair of the silverback gorillas and the chamaeleon colours of the
anuses of baboons; the hair of the head, the only hair that never stops growing, is the sole ostentatious excess of
human bodies. In the Roman empire, men and women dressed in sober togas with minimal decoration; even the
crown of the emperor was only a laurel wreath. It was in the late Middle Ages that glamour was invented in Europe:
the knights began to dress in extravagant garb of refined fabrics, dyed and embroidered linens and silks, decorated
with ruffles and lace, set off with furs. Unlike the stately and static raiment of the monarch, their apparel was
designed to be displayed in movement in parades, dances, and tournaments though both the bulk and the refinement
of this apparel handicaps movement. They contrasted the sleek clinging of stockings and leggings and bared chests
with billowing shoulders, flared sleeves, and flowing capes. They grafted upon themselves the glittering plumes of
rare birds, the secret inner nacreous splendours of oysters, the winter gleam of fox fur. At their crotches they sported
brocaded and jewelled codpieces. They wore helmets of gleaming metal adorned with filmy plumes; their boots were
embossed leather with buckles of silver. They wore jewellery of precious metals and precious stones and perfumes
made of musks. They remained professional warriors and bore arms, but their swords were forged of rare metals and
the hilts adorned with jewels. The extravagantly arrayed body was set apart, remote from all laborious concerns, on
display and alluring.
The knights evolved a specific beauty which is ostentatious, spectacular, monstrous glamourous. It is not
the beauty of ideal bodies celebrated in classical sculpture, the splendour of harmony, proportion, and inner
timelessness, that is, without internal factors of disequilibrium or change. It is not the functional beauty of
workman's garb, Mongolian herdsman's longcoat, boots, and fur hat, aviators' jackets and helmets. Their garb
enlarges and distorts the proportions of body parts, the head, the arms, the genitals. The body is used as a frame for
the display of the gossamer texture or heavy folds of fabrics. Intense and showy colours and intricate embroidery
and beadwork are displayed. While colours and textures and designs are harmonized, they are so in contrasting
intensity.
The knights cultivated stately and ceremonious ways of gesturing and moving, marked with statuesque
postures and poses. They carried on their wrists hooded falcons themselves with gorgeously designed and coloured
plumage. They paraded mounted on sleek horses with embossed and studded saddles. The knights developed special
vocalizations declamations, epic chants, and romantic songs.
Armed, bold, displaying virile postures and vigour, the knights exhibited a touchy susceptibility and sense
of honour before other males. Females become entranced by the most lavishly attired males or those who display
most dashingly or persistently. The qualities the knights exhibit, however, are not those of a good spouse: someone
who would cooperate with the female in setting up a household, someone with skills in agriculture and craft,
someone who would cooperate with the female in rearing the offspring. Susceptible of going off to battle at any
time, disengaged from agricultural work, knights are at best intermittent parents.
The knightly glamour spread to the clergy. For the princes of the Church no fabric was too refined, no
expenditure of jewellery excessive for their vestments. Even plebeian parish priests began dressing in extravagant
ceremonial raiment.
The ostentatious splendour of the knights eventually produced permission for their female consorts to adorn
themselves with more and more impractical garb and more and more extravagant fabrics and designs. The courtesans
were chosen to breed offspring but they were able to separate themselves from the burdens of parenting, leaving
nursing and nurturing to servants.
The knightly display, a courtship of women, is also turned toward other men, those friendly and those
hostile. Knights compete with one another in splendour and also in altruism in rescues, in assistance to the exploited,
the weak, in taking risks. Other than recognition of their superior status, they want nothing from those they benefit.
Their prestige is the proof they give that they have excess energies and resources to squander. The knights are
warriors, but their contests occur in carrousels, tournaments, on parade grounds. Their jousts stop short of killing or
even serious injury. Most warfare is psychological warfare.
Strenuous intrasexual competition, coupled possibly with polygamy, has resulted in the evolution of the
remarkable vigour, aggressive temperament, histrionic raiment and elaborate display specializations of the knights. It
is a remarkable fact that the evolution of this astonishingly complex aesthetic reproductive mechanism has
apparently rendered the knighthood neither more nor less numerically successful in reproducing their genes than
many other quite undistinguished males of the immediate environment.
40 Comparative or Intensifying Words

This seems to supply an obstacle to the post-Darwinian biologist's effort to understand sexual selection in
the context of ordinary natural selection to understand female sexual selection as selection of fitness and
reproductive success. But is not something else evolving also in courtship so widespread in species from fruit flies to
hummingbirds and emperor penguins namely, the evolution of individuality and individual attachment? “Sexual
selection provides our earliest clear examples in the animal kingdom of the selection by one individual or another for
personal qualities such as appearance, behaviour, and probably other attributes that we fail to recognise
ornithologist”, Alexander Skutch observed. “It is an important step in the emergence of personality from the level of
species uniformity. When mutual, sexual selection leads to lasting individual attachments and, ultimately, to
friendship and conjugal fidelity, thus contributing to moral as well as physical beauty.”

3. Modern Times

In the epoch of European mercantilist imperialism, glamour, invented by men, becomes taboo to men. The
knights become obsolete as all the young men of an imperialist nation are enlisted into armies; their heads are shaven
of their hair, that natural adornment, their bodies are clad in camouflage or drab uniforms. The captains of industry
and their managerial troops are, in New York, Houston, and Silicon Valley, as in Berlin, Milan, Sâo Paulo, Tokyo
and Shanghai, clad in the blue or grey flannel business suit with necktie. At Penn State University I got lost one day
and found myself in the business school; there on the bulletin boards of the hallways I found big posters instructing
students how to dress for job interviews. Every detail was illustrated, from haircut to colour of socks and type of
shoes. It was, I discovered, what they call “power dressing.”
In the epoch of industrial capitalism, factory women dressed like factory men; it was the idle spouse and
daughter of the capitalist who devoted herself to glamour. Delicate, fragile, ethereal fabrics were manufactured for
her; she hung webs of gold chains and jewels about her neck and around her wrists; she spent hours at the
hairdresser; she learned the body-curving catwalk and willowy gestures and how to flutter her eyelashes and make
ambiguously suggestive smiles. The consummate feminine look is that blasé look, that vaporous look, that impudent
look, that cold look, that look of looking inward, that dominating look, that voluptuous look, that wicked look, that
sick look, that catlike look, infantilism, nonchalance, and malice compounded Baudelaire observed. All the fashion
designers of haute culture are men.
In the contemporary American and European corporate world, women have been demanding access to
managerial and ownership positions in the corporations and entry into the imperialist armies. They too, in business
schools, learn power dressing; in the armies and the vast secret gulag of American prisons from Guantanamo to Abu
Ghraib, they dress and behave as male soldiers too. It is in the outer zones, of South America, Africa, south Asia,
and Russia, where local industries and agriculture are being ruined by Western corporate dumping, that the glamour
of Hollywood celebrities and fashion models is being huckstered to the increasing numbers of women deprived of
employment.

4. Erotic Glamour as a Value

Value terms are used in judgements that compare and rank. We evaluate implements, situations, events, and
also our fellow humans. We compare collaborators as to productivity, skill, dedication, reliability. We appraise
neighbours and fellow-citizens as to their law-abiding character, their responsibility, their just or unjust behaviour.
We grade students and associates as to how intelligent, conscientious, and truthful they are. We rank acquaintances
as how helpful and how amusing they are. Through comparison we can establish norms and project ideals.
Comparative evaluations are made in the name of the group, the collective projects. We do not really speak
of values in the erotic attachment of individuals. We see that it happens all the time that someone falls in love with a
man or woman that nobody in the group finds even attractive. The sexual selection Charles Darwin recognized to
function in nature is an animal drive, and it functions to promote individualism, individual qualities of glamour to
the cost of survival fitness, and individual attachment.
It was when the barbarian warriors ceased to be on the road conquering and pillaging, and settled down on
landed estates in feudal Europe, most of the time idle in war and certainly idle on their estates, that the culture of
glamour of the knights arose and flourished. The medieval glamour cultivated by the knights was seen to be in
conflict with the values of the modern nations, constructed with mercantilist and imperialist programs of enrichment
and world domination. The medieval glamour cultivated by the knights promotes individuality and lasting individual
attachments, but the founders of modern nation-states in Europe and America viewed population as wealth and
collective power. The male population was to be increased and harnessed to provide energy in industrial mass
 Alphonso Lingis 41

production. The male population was to be increased, kept healthy and trained in muscular strength to provide
national armies on the front lines of the European and American global imperialism.

Glamour took refuge in the female population, that is, the upper-class, idle female population.

5. The Erotic Industry

The key problem in industrialized capitalist societies is no longer production; computerized, robotized,
driven by electrical and nuclear power, productivity is virtually unlimited. What disrupts these societies is limits in
the markets for their always increasing production – the portion of the exchange-value of the production distributed
to the workers as wages limits their ability to buy up all the products they produce, and outside markets, colonies and
unindustrialized countries, have limited funds to buy up all the products industrially produced. The masses of
individuals are not needed as producers, but as consumers.
What is promoted, under terms such as Western culture, Western civilization, democracy, and Western
values is the global market economy, dominated by vast, profoundly undemocratic corporations which enrich
Europe and America.
Today feminine glamour is the principal item in what is called Western culture now promoted aggressively
on every continent and in every old culture. Celebrities, Madonna in Japan, Whitney Spears in Budapest, female
beauty contests are the pilot entry force of economic globalism, that is, opening up trade barriers to Western
corporate marketing. To justify the occupation of Afghanistan as a liberation, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice
spoke much of the oppression of women; after the occupation the New York Times and Time magazine ran feature
articles with photographs of beauty parlours covered with posters of Western fashion models in Kabul. As soon as
some electricity could be restored, theatres showing Hollywood romances were opened in Bagdad.
Media producers, advertising companies, and fashion designers select, publicize, and use women they
identify as beautiful. Women do not escape the discourse on beauty; each woman finds herself ranked among other
more, or less, beautiful women and is induced to see herself in her place in this ranking. The gradations of
comparison project an ideal of beauty, against which real women find themselves in one aspect or another wanting.
The beauty and fashion industry take pains to endow their models of beauty with civic virtue; the media
depict these beautiful and desirable women as successful career women and mothers; fashion models themselves are
depicted as working women, posing for photographers and doing the catwalk depicted as a demanding and gruelling
job. But there remains something disreputable about feminine beauty and sensuality.
What Darwin called sexual selection and what we can call sensual behaviour and culture among humans
has always been seen to be in conflict with ethics. Ethics was set up by Aristotle to combat the ancient ethos of Fate;
it is committed to the doctrine that human welfare and excellence are the result of decision, choice, and effort. But
physical shape, size, complexion, and physical beauty are the result of heredity and chance. Ethics is leery of the
respect accorded to beauty. Beauty, endowed by indifferent fate, should not be used to gain advantage, in education,
in the economic arena.
Immanuel Kant sought to bring the respect for physical beauty into the ethical sphere. He wrote that while
there is no ideal of beauty for flowers or for furniture, there is an ideal of beauty for humans. And that is, he
explains, because the physical substrate of face and posture inevitably materializes relationships to others that are
governed by ethical concerns. The ideally beautiful face in the strength of its features, its proportions, equilibrium,
and harmony of tone incarnates integrity, self-consciousness, autonomy, and responsibility. For Kant autonomy
means subject only to the law one legislates for oneself but that law, qua law, could only be universal and necessary,
thus could only be the dictates of reason which are the same everywhere for everybody. The face that materializes
strength, sensuality, superabundant vitality outside of the gearings of civic and productive relations with others the
face that looks frivolous and irresponsible could not be seen as beautiful by Kant.
For the Kantian ideal we would be wise to look at the depictions of artists rather than look in salons and
kitchens, because of course heredity and chance do not distribute shape and size according to merit. But the
contemporary beauty and fashion industry has reinstated Kant's position by a different route: they proclaim that a
woman can make herself beautiful by decision, choice, and effort. Diet and plastic surgery can correct anomalous
size and shape, cosmetics can correct hair colour and complexion. As ethics finds a woman guilty of intellectual,
volitional, and practical failings, the beauty and fashion industry declare her guilty of aesthetic faults. And numerous
therapists, supplemented with masseurs, oils, perfumes, music and orgasmic recordings, are there to correct deficient
sensuality, were she but to make the decision and expend the effort. The same rationality, decisiveness, and
disciplined effort that make her a woman of integrity, self-consciousness, and responsibility make her beautiful and
42 Comparative or Intensifying Words

alluring. Elegantly sensual clothing and jewellery will protect her body from what is crude and bestial in eyes and
drives of men.

6. The Persistence of Sexual Selection

In the heady days when craft production was being replaced by industrial mass production of commodities
and European and American imperialist armies came to subjugate some 80 percent of the human population of the
planet, Western anthropologists and philosophers separated humans from the other animals by declaring that humans
live in history and not in nature; they alone create and recreate their environments. Now we are said to exist in an
entirely new world, no longer in the industrial epoch but the information age. The advanced fortress-nations of the
planet derive their ever increasing wealth from the production, management, and control of information. The two
world wars into which these societies plunged the planet showed how barbarous, destructive, and self-destructive
these populations were. The current war of terror in the name of civilization has aroused the most barbaric instincts
of blood-revenge, race hatred, and the most base instincts of torture in ordinary Americans and British.
Is it not also true that the behaviours of humans, even in the advanced industrial and imperialist nations, is
not purely and simply defined by the vast and immensely profitable erotic industry, by the cult of celebrities and
fashion model glamour, by media marketing? Is it not true that the values of that industry, that values in general, the
values of the collective, are not the sole markers of our behaviours? Is it not true that we are also animals like the
others in our sensual culture and behaviours?

7. Exclamatory Utterances

There is a strange ambiguity in our language, in value terms. Value terms are used in judgements that
compare and rank. But value terms are not only used comparatively. Value terms are also used in exclamatory
utterances that consecrate what we have seen or felt. With gaze adrift we stroll through the summer meadow; from
time to time our look stops on surprises the blaze of unnameable colours on a butterfly, the cheeky parading of an
unidentifiable bird in the grass: “Gorgeous!” Just out for a walk in the city streets, our gaze shifting with the
rhythms of movement, we avoid looking at passers-by: but abruptly there is before us the enigmatic Mona Lisa grin
under the retro hat of a woman, there a python coiled about the bare chest of a black adolescent. “Cool!” we
murmur. These words are themselves forces; they intensify the impact of things never seen before, never seen again.
The exultation of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis so fills and exults the soul and cuts away all one's vexations
and practical projects and excludes any comparison with the music of others, such that when it comes to an end one
could only wish to hear it again from the beginning. In the Himalayan dawn one's heart leaps at seeing, flaming high
over the clouds, the mountain imperialists named Everest but which the Nepalese had called Sogarmatha Sky Mother
and the exultation of the present disconnects all regrets, resentments, even memories of the harassments and miseries
of the itinerary taken to get here, as it obturates the horizons of the future such that one no longer longs for things yet
to see. These moments of superabundance are cherished in memory but are not measured by the idea-limit of an
ideal. Nor are they measured by one another; the exultation of the Missa Solemnis and that of Himalayan heights are
incomparable.
With value terms we also consecrate and intensify states of life of our own life. Life is not simply the forces
of hunger, thirst, and want in a material organism; a living organism generates excess energies. Even in those vast
regions of the planet called underdeveloped, in times of health people find so many things upon which to discharge
their vital energies running when you could walk, jumping into the air or into the water, caring for young animals in
the wild or for flowering plants, looking after and nurturing their own or others' children, dancing, feasting with
extravagant costumes, body decoration, and luxurious meals. In excavations of the most ancient humans
archeologists find jewellery and ornamentation, the products of human skills devoted to luxury objects.
Paleoanthropologists found stone tools from 1.4 million years ago they named “bifaces”; they are longer than broad,
pointed at one end and rounded at the other, with symmetrical curved contours from end to end and from edge to
edge on both sides, requiring long hours of meticulous skill exhibiting the pleasure ancient humanoids felt of making
something not only useful but perfect and beautiful. Surges of superabundant vitality felt inwardly as exultation give
rise to exclamations: How great I feel! we murmur to ourselves. How good to be alive! Health of body and of
mind! How strong I am! Here “great,” “good,” “strong,” “healthy” are primary, positive value terms that derive
their meaning from their inner content and not from comparisons with their opposites, nor even with prior states of
oneself. These strong words empower, these beautiful words enhance, the healthy words invigorate, the noble words
 Alphonso Lingis 43

ennoble oneself. “Wow!” exclaims the diver when he first discovers the psychedelic lives of the coral reef, the
skydiver who free falling sees the tapestried landscape of the planet rush up toward him. They will find more precise
terms to celebrate and consecrate these states: the rapture of the deep, the earth-rush.
The word “beautiful” also functions outside of all comparison, to intensify, to consecrate, to celebrate when
coming upon the electric purple flowers of a tangle of weeds in a back lot, when contemplating the magnesium-fire
rim of a storm cloud in winter. “Erotic!” too is uttered outside of all comparison, when swimming naked in a lake
thick with gyrating yellowgreen plants, when seeing the pink-skinned sheep sprawled against the thighs of the youth
shearing the wool. We do know the uncanny effect of the words “How beautiful I am!” “How sexy I am!” one
murmurs to oneself, out of the hearing of others. One says “How sexy I am!” because one feels it, and in saying it
one feels still more sexy. One says “How beautiful I am!” and these beautiful words prolong themselves into
graceful movements that advance in the light that makes furnishings, trees and flowers and sky phosphoresce, in the
night that sets free gleams and glows from the hard edges of reality.

8. Fearful Words

We freely praise men and women for being responsible, brave, honest, thoughtful, tactful, generous, and
know that to speak these words of homage and celebration is the noblest use of language. That the other accept and
assume these words seems to us to give him or her new force; we believe that it is good that the stout-hearted woman
know that she is brave, that the impulsive man know he is generous. And when we say to someone “How brave you
are!” or “How generous you are!” these words of homage addressed to another already commit us to overcome our
timidity or mean-spiritedness.
How strange that we feel so many constraints from telling another that she or he is beautiful, telling
ourselves that we are beautiful! When we look at someone “beautiful” seems to name something anyone can see,
but to face someone and say “You are beautiful” feels like an initiative that has troubling effects on her and on
oneself. Do we feel that this value word put on the strength of her features, the proportions, equilibrium, and
harmony of tone, the poise and agility of her posture devalues integrity, self-consciousness, autonomy, and
responsibility in her? “How beautiful you look!” we say to the bride, a friend that is trying on a dress, or a friend
returned from the hairdresser smothering the complement addressed to her body with a complement on her good
taste or luck in locating beautiful garb or adornment. In mixed company no woman should talk about her own
beauty. In mixed company a woman may face a man and say “How handsome you are!” but nothing is more
prohibited among men. For a man to accept these words and assume them, to speak of his own good looks is
unmanly.
Yet we do not hesitate to praise every other body in nature for its beauty. We have no moral qualms about
rejoicing over the beauty of a racehorse, a cat, a fox, an antelope, a swan, a butterfly, a beetle. We do not hesitate to
exclaim over the beauty of plants, of flowers, those ostentatious sex-organs.
At the same time our own beauty is supremely important to us. We readily admit to being not possessed of
civic virtues, of not being a good citizen, we are not ashamed to admit we fail to vote or cut corners when filing our
taxes. We accept being guilty of ethical failures; we can admit we're no saint without feeling loss of dignity or value.
We even rather like a good dose of backsliding, dishonesty, outright rascality in our character. But nobody wants to
be ugly; it is the one thing that we cannot reconcile ourselves to. Psychotherapists know that there is nothing that so
irremediably damages the core of a person's identity as the conviction that he or she is ugly. Someone who would
make ugly his or her body parts seems to us to be simply perverted.
Words, which should invoke and reveal and clarify, confuse us so much in this domain. The advertizing
industry, the pilot industry of industrial and information capitalism, is paid to put confusion in words, images, and
behaviours. It totally confuses the comparative use of value words, to classify and to judge, with the exclamatory
and consecrating and intensifying use of words: How healthy I feel! How good to be alive! How strong I am, with
energies to squander! How beautiful I am! How sexy I feel! The language of values is especially constructed to
confuse. Ethics condemns what Darwin called sexual selection, which prizes individuality and individual qualities
and individual attachments, because ethics is committed to the doctrine that human welfare and excellence are the
result of decision, choice, and effort, but physical shape, size, complexion, and physical beauty are the result of
heredity and chance. In practice ethics is in the service of the collective; ethical values are used to classify and judge
traits and behaviours in the name of humanity, the collective, the nation state devoted to wealth and power. Ethics
condemns as animal what Darwin called the drives of sexual selection, opposed to the natural selection of the fittest.
But Darwin's own term, sexual selection, is surely a poor, cold and colourless, term to designate what for we human
44 Comparative or Intensifying Words

animals is the warmest and most radiant compulsions of our life, producing, Freud said, the most intense pleasures
possible in the lives of we animals.

9. Consecrating, Intensifying One's Sensuality

The beauty that one consecrates in oneself is splendour that radiates and that enchants, captivates; even the
“inner beauty” of character and demeanour are manifested outwardly. Sensuality, that sinking into the torments of
enjoyment, is inevitably manifest to others and affects them as a seduction. But it would be wrong to, in Hegelian
fashion, assert that beauty and eroticism exist only in relationship with others and are constituted in that relationship.
For one can make oneself an artwork which others may ignore, disdain, and reject. It is not the expectations and
responses of others that determine one's sensuality, which draws its force instead from the affirmation one gives to
one's corporeal turmoil.
The woman who judges herself “pretty as a picture” views herself from without and distances herself from
the vibrant sense of her own agency and her own body. She has incomparable access to only these facial muscles,
this hearing, this touch, these tensile arms, the stabilizing and launching force in these legs, these breasts, this
vagina, this heart, the pumping of this blood. But she can instead engage the intensifying, consecrating function of
the term “beautiful” to repel its comparative usage and to exorcize the spectre of the absent ideal projected by that
usage. The means is pleasure. There is pleasure in her blazing eyes, the restless mobility of her facial muscles, the
broad suppleness of her lips, the naturally hirsute legs so energetically rock-climbing, the bigness of her small
stature as it occupies space. It is this substance vibrant with superabundant vitality that she shall consecrate with the
words “beautiful” and “erotic.”
An amateur photographer friend of mine asked his friends and students to identity their favourite body part;
one said his legs, another her lips, his eyes, her hands, his chest, her breasts, his cock, her toes. The photographer
spent a year photographing these body parts, working again and again with angles, soft or hard focus, lighting, so
that his images of them would be as desirable as these body parts were to these friends and students themselves. A
photographer reveals beauty in ragged street kids, in the faces of the old in nursing homes, in dead trees grappling
against the leaden skies of winter, in back alleys, in garbage scattered by wind. To do so she photographs these
things in extreme close-up or from a great distance, framed or partially concealed by other things, through mists or
in silhouette, in momentary or oblique light. One who wishes to discover his or her own beauty should follow
himself or herself as a photographer, viewing her body part up close or in a very distant mirror, oiling his body or
ruffling fine sand in all his body hairs, viewing her body through the waves of a lake and between the seaweed,
catching glimpses of himself reflected in wineglasses and on the big eyes of horses, glowing by the light of a
campfire or casting a shadow in moonlight.
For a woman to disconnect her own beauty from the ideal of beauty projected by the comparative use of the
value term is also to disconnect her beauty from the ethical ideal, where ethics governs human interaction in the
civic, economic, and pedagogical arenas. Or at least where ethics means rationality, calculation of profit and loss,
prudence, and command and obedience. There are those who do not hold back from celebrating beauty and eroticism
in zones forbidden by ethics, in the classroom where it is threatened by sexual harassment litigation, in S&M clubs
and games. Gratuitous beauty and sensuality are of themselves generous: they radiate warmth and light without
asking anything in return.. And it is they, rather than the self-satisfaction that is earned and merited, that cast flash-
fires of happiness in human lives.

10. Our Nature and Nature

We mark our disapproval of those who impudently use the value terms “beautiful” and “erotic” to intensify
their own sensibility, to consecrate themselves, with the words “vain,” “conceited,” “narcissist.” To value oneself
for one's beauty and sensuality is to disconnect oneself from collaboration with and service to others, to isolate
oneself from duty and responsibility, to idolize oneself. Yet this narcissism and idolatry depersonalize us.
Compound of sensuality, lust, and the most exorbitant refinements of masquerade, eroticism would give us
our most intense sense of ourselves more intense than all the other pleasures, more intense than pain. The loss of
libido, whether by illness, surgery, or ageing, is felt as an undermining of our very sense of identity. But this most
intense affirmation of oneself works a depersonalization. In the measure that we give ourselves over to voluptuous
pleasures, we lose our sense of our position in the cooperation and labour of society, of our own projects and
 Alphonso Lingis 45

ambitions, of dignity, of responsibility, we expose ourselves to and abandon ourselves to another or others, moved
by them. We are anonymous bodies, collapsed in spasms of torment and pleasure, eyes, fingers, organs given over to
the giving of pleasure to anonymous bodies.

Looking out over the clouds from airplanes, looking upon the landscape from automobiles, strolling along
the riverbank, in contemplating beauty we are stilled, opened to surfaces and depths nearby and remote. The sense of
beauty is ecstatic. The sense of our own beauty does not turn into the sense of possessing a closed and self-sufficient
form that would be ourselves, pretty as a picture. Everyone knows the ephemeral nature of beauty, youthful blush or
transitory grace of aging. Ephemeral gift given by random chance, our beauty and sensuality are gifts destined to
give.
Our scientists, with their physics, chemistry, dynamics, and electromagnetism have shown how every entity
and event in the micro and macrocosmic universe are governed by a determinism that explain how and why they
occur, act, and react. Everywhere we look, at the coral fish in the ocean, the beetles, butterflies, foxes and zebras on
the land, the birds in the sky, the sky itself putting on its grandiose light show at the beginning and end of each in
unnameable colours never repeated, we see beauty. Determinist science offers no explanation why these things are
beautiful. Ephemeral and gratuitous, the beauty nature is so determined to create is given, gifts destined to give joy,
itself destined to be given.
 Metaphors, the Erotic & Survival
or
How I learned to Use a Tool of Repressive Normalization
as an Instrument of Eroto-sexual Revolution

Jennifer M. Collins
1. Metaphors: shaping experiences

This is about language and naming and truth. This is about words and about how what I say, and
how I say it, shapes not only what I’m trying to express but also what I know. This is about words, about the
correct usage of words - and who decides what “correct” means. This is about metaphor and erotics and a
desire for self within self. This is about possibility and connection. This is a breaking down and unraveling.
This is the unwoven web, the unrolled spiral, the dance traced back to the beginning, or the end. How can I
write about the erotic, the bearing over through metaphor, of love and truth and connection, when I was
trained out of it, trained into linear, rigid thought - trained into language that was about self-preservation rather
than self-revelation? What right do I have to risk the erotic? Then again, as Audre Lorde might question 1 ,
what right have I not to?
As with all things elemental, a story about the re-embodiment of language and erotics cannot be told
as an unbroken narrative, as some “logical” straight line. This is a collection of fragments and once-mislaid
connections - of memory, metaphor and meaning.
Metaphor is an essential part of how we perceive the world around us. 2 My dictionary gives the
following definition for “metaphor”: a noun, originating from two Greek words - meta, meaning over, and
pherein, meaning to bear. It is a figure of speech in which one thing is spoken of as if it were another. Lakoff
and Johnson assert that

“[o]ur concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we
relate to other people. […] If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is
largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every
day is very much a matter of metaphor.” 3

Metaphor is possibility and chance, connection and trust - especially metaphor that goes against
mainstream understandings. Read the poetry of incest survivors, of rape victims: everything’s broken,
darkness, violated, betrayal, lack: we write ourselves according to the metaphors used to organize the identity
“incest survivor.” We who have experienced sexual abuse rarely take chances with our metaphors, with our
tellings, because we want to be heard and understood. We were almost always challenged when we spoke
ourselves factually: “What are you talking about?” “You’re crazy - you must have asked for it.” To be
challenged on our own poetry, on the metaphor of our dreams, is too much.
“‘Metaphor,’ Aristotle wrote, ‘consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.’
Saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as philosophy and poetry, and the
spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding and expressiveness.” 4
Metaphor is naming - thus, some claiming of “ownership” over a concept or an idea. Metaphor allows for an
internalization of concepts. Metaphors offer us the potential of new ways of seeing, new ways of knowing.
They are, therefore, risky, particularly for those who are survivors of brainwashing, those who have been told:
This is the way it is; This is the way things are; This is the way the world is (and, in some respects, isn’t that all
of us?). The challenge to those old learnings via novel metaphor can feel like it’s occurring at a gut level-as
though we are being torn open inside by conflicting alliances: a commitment to the survival of the physical
body (which we internalized during the abuse itself-and which usually entails a commitment to continued
silence, on multiple levels) and a loyalty of a more primal sense - to uninhibited expression of self: to our
erotic power.
How do any of us make sense of ourselves and our experiences in life? Why do we identify as this,
that or the other thing? Identity is about naming, and has as much to do with being named by others (who
claim and/or define a particular identity) as with naming ourselves. How do we articulate the metaphors by
which we come to know ourselves? How can we learn to risk and play with and through metaphors so
entrenched in common, everyday language that we come to perceive them as literal rather than figurative
expressions?
The language we use defines how we “see” ourselves, and the metaphors in common usage shape that
perception. “[O]wnership of widely used metaphors conveys power, and it is recognised that control of the
prevalent metaphors used to talk about a topic can contribute to the control of how the topic is generally
48 Metaphors, the erotic & survival or How I learned to use a tool of repressive normalization
as an instrument of eroto-sexual revolution

considered.” 5 Do the metaphors in common use today regarding incest/child sexual abuse help to further the
current social order? What do the prevalent metaphors by which we as a society use to talk about incest, do
for a culture intent upon restricting children’s and women’s sexual behavior? What are the benefits to this
society of women’s/survivors’ feelings of brokenness and fragmentation? How does it benefit the status quo
to have a mass of “walking wounded,” of “broken” women (and men)? Alice Deignan writes: “Metaphors ...
are not only a reflection of mental processes; the relationship [between (our perception of) topic 6 and vehicle 7
] is a dynamic one and metaphors can both expand and limit thought and action.” 8
How do we reclaim the power of the erotic once it’s attacked and defied/defined/defiled by abusers?
What do we lose when we lose our access to that power - or are never taught it at all? In thinking about the
ways in which our culture defines incest (and incest survivors) through the metaphors used to talk about it
(and us), I am brought back to my experience with incest, and the way that my stepfather (the perpetrator)
used language as just another weapon in his arsenal, as an integral part of his abusive behavior - how could it
not be so?
“Survivors” or “victims” of sexual abuse tend to be referred to as, for example, sexually damaged.
So, am I broken? I call attention to the metaphorical language; I struggle not to let it blindly define me/us.
Show me the broken places. Let me show you. In your discomfort you begin to realize the truth between the
literal and the figurative. Look up “broken” in the dictionary. Am I fragmented splintered or fractured? Not in
working order? Violated, ruined; interrupted, imperfectly spoken or tamed? There are metaphors used so
often that they become conflated with the thing they were enlisted to describe: Raped women = “damaged
goods.” It is not a metaphor anymore if the topic and vehicle come to be understood as essentially the same
thing. Are there novel metaphors that we can use through which we can come to know ourselves differently,
or through which we can see the aspects of ourselves that have been occluded by such metaphors as “damaged
goods” and “scorched earth”?
How do we speak of these reenvisionings of ourselves and how will we be heard? So often, we try
and fail. We are not heard when we speak in the tongue of the Father, and we are not heard when we turn that
tongue inside out, upside down, take it out and write with it on the moon. The ways that we are indoctrinated
into silences in this culture are abundant and varied. We are silenced through metaphor, through cultural
understanding of our identities. Sexual abuse itself is one of these silencings. The “discursive
subordination,” 9 required first by our perpetrators and then others who identify as incest Survivors, is another.
The lack of complex language for articulating our experience is a third. Thus, we learn, we practice, we repeat
silencing ourselves with the language we are taught and not taught. They work hard to ensure that we won’t be
able to talk about what they do. They don’t want us to have a language - they wanted our mouths, our throats,
empty when we opened up so they could shove their cocks in. They take words from our mouths and eat
them: they feed on us.
So where does all of this go? To language. To sex. To self. To pleasure and fear. To naming and
identity. To metaphor and how we perceive who we are through the words we use to know ourselves - through
the words we are taught for ourselves.
Metaphor is an essential part of human speech. Particular metaphors tend to be supported by society,
while others are dismissed or devalued when they don’t help those currently in power to further their power.
Because of the nature of metaphor to highlight one/some aspect(s) of a topic, while hiding other aspects, it is
essential that we examine the metaphors we use everyday, particularly the ones that affect the ways that we
perceive ourselves. Alice Deignan writes,

“Mey (1994:64) also takes the view that metaphors can distort understanding, and argues that
almost any unanalysed metaphor is dangerous if uncritically accepted; it is important to examine
metaphors and their assumptions and entailments.” 10

The fucked daughter is a cracked vessel: How do we get outside metaphors so pervasive that they’ve
shaped cultures’ thinking for thousands of years? It can be terrifying when I realize that the way I’ve
understood a particular aspect of myself is utterly metaphorical, because I have internalized this perception,
this metaphor, this way of knowing. “Damaged goods” is not a true statement, not a factual statement - and
yet, for the raped woman, we know it to be true because this is the prevailing metaphor that our society uses
for violated women. We know ourselves as damaged; there’s no other commonly available language to
describe this feeling. Thus, when I start to question these metaphors, before the experience is liberating, it’s
terrifying - I feel the earth shifting under my feet and dropping away. There’s nothing left to stand on once
one begins to experience oneself outside of common, accepted understanding/belief. If the only way around
old metaphors is through new/different metaphors 11 , then an erotic writing practice can help facilitate
experimentation with these new metaphors in a somewhat safe situation. An erotic writing practice is a
regular, consistent practice of undirected free writing that is to do with our complex and positive, adult,
consensual sexuality. This is writing that is released from the pressure of performance: the writer follows the
 Jennifer M. Collins 49

pull of the writing, through the nonsensical, the non sequitur, the labyrinth of the self’s erotics. Pleasure and
growth arise through the process of exploration and play - we are released from so-called “correct” desire (as
related to whatever Identity we’ve chosen), and learn to articulate what has been without language - and we
begin to rename, multiply name, ourselves.

2. Metaphor is the erotic element in language 12

The induction into incest is a killing, a driving into sameness, and thus a driving toward death: a
naming and a forcing-into that name. You will always be as I name you. The Father demands obeisance and an
ever-increasing access to the dying thing he has created. For those who’ve been written into incest, renewed
access to metaphor allows for a swimming-through the names of the Fathers, allows for a redefinition of the
landscapes of our linguistic lives, allows for a renewed access to the erotic - and thus to life.
As soon as I think “erotic,” I think “sex.” These two words, and the concepts I was taught that they
signified, are conflated for me. Audre Lorde reminds me that this does not necessarily need to be the case:
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the
power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” 13 Experimentation with metaphor can help us to connect
with this depth, to bring it to some form of expression. “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our
sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” 14 The beginning of our sense of self. Thus, through the
erotic, we do not necessarily come to know ourselves as we were or as we might have been (prior to or sans
sexual abuse) - but we begin to have access to any sense of self at all. We must dive into that chaos away from
that to which we have been directed and trained if we are to experience the fullness of possibility and power in
our lives.
Metaphor is insidious. In order to understand a metaphor, the listener must resolve the apparent
disconnect between the topic and the vehicle, and this resolution occurs within the listener. This is the power
of metaphor in poetry, this intimate connection between poet and reader, when the reader follows a poet’s
metaphor through her own consciousness to a place of electric discovery and denouement. There is a trust
required to make this work, and in the space between the opening and closing of a metaphor are worlds of
possibility, chance and risk. I have been afraid of metaphor: the erotics, the connection, inherent in its usage.
“Every metaphor is a little purgatory.” 15 Purgatory - that waiting place. The place of bearing over,
thick with connection between Earth and the other worlds; containing elements of both Heaven and Hell, and
flowing between them. It’s been essential for me to engage with this purgatory, with the metaphors of myself,
in order to know myself differently - in order, in fact, to be different from the “damaged goods” I’d come to
understand myself to be.
“Metaphor: that which joins, that which announces connection, overlap, shared essence, and yet
retains the actual distance between whatever objects it brings together.” 16 The erotic is a border crossing, a
shifting through the sands and watery edges between us and between/among our selves. What bravery required
from all of us who have been initiated into the sharp painful oblivion that is the anti-erotics of sexual abuse to
re-engage with language/self in this way, to risk the blurring of edges when we have worked so hard to define
them well and hard in order to protect ourselves.
There is writing that is of the sexual, the bodily, the sensual and there is writing that uses
unusual/figurative language, or plays with the rules of genre, in order to draw both the writer and the reader
more deeply into the piece. I assert that the latter is erotic in itself, no matter what the subject: writing that
invades the spaces between things, writing that allows for connection between reader and subject, between
reader and writer, between/among bodies and minds, writing that breaks down the honeycomb walls that make
up the disconnects among our different selves. “Cixous’s ... work offers an écriture - a practice of writing -
that aims to do this (‘flying in language and making it fly’ 17 ) by posing plurality against unity; multitudes of
meanings against single, fixed meanings; diffuseness against instrumentality; openness against closure.” 18
Cixous utilizes erotics - of language, of form, and of subject matter - to create a writing that connects and
expands, simultaneously. Erotic writing dives deep through the writer to the reader. It is intended to connect,
if by “connect” we can agree to mean “bring together,” to bear through one to the other - not to control but to
know more deeply, possibly to unify that which was previously dissociated. The erotic is exponentiated,
experienced as greater than simply the sum of the text’s parts: subject and structure, form and philosophy.
We must each be responsible for declaring our own erotic, lest the Powers-That-Be (all those powers
of state, moral, religious, political) continue to claim the right to name their erotic as ours. Others’ perceptions
of what is or is not erotic aren’t important when someone is struggling to access the language, the metaphor, of
her erotics. What’s most important is that she experience the connections occurring within herself, the
dissolution and disoccurance of the once-essential compartmentalization of different aspects of her life. What
matters is that she begin to become thickly aware of her own juices, her own unguent self. Says Cixous: “A
feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it
doesn’t stop[...] This takes the metaphorical form of wandering, excess, risk of the unreckonable: no
50 Metaphors, the erotic & survival or How I learned to use a tool of repressive normalization
as an instrument of eroto-sexual revolution

reckoning, a feminine text can’t be predicted, isn’t predictable, isn’t knowable and is therefore very disturbing.
It can’t be anticipated, and I believe femininity is written outside anticipation: it really is the text of the
unforseeable” 19 . Of course, this unknowing was initially terrifying for me, someone trained to know - or to go
empty altogether - if I wanted to survive any encounter with my stepfather. This option of an experience of
internal delirium on the way to some uncertain outcome can seem frivolous, illogical, or stupid. But, when I
allow myself to follow a line of thought, without trying to control its direction, but instead trusting what I
might find there, I am engaging in erotic writing and it becomes a reclamation of self, a reclamation of the
vast power of self.
I run between the hard literal and the vast metaphor in my writing now. I either stay tight close to
detail and fact, or unfurl the enormous wings of bird lines into the poem, trying to find a way to sing. Visions
can be too complex for logic. Metaphors are too hard (and easy) to quarrel with. Between where I am now and
the place of my verbs, the alley way between there and here, is a purgatory: this great unknowable terrain,
littered with words licked by his tongue, littered with memory bits and black pansies, littered with elephant
footsteps. Still I step in.
Deborah Cameron, quoted in Language and Desire, writes:

“Whereas sociolinguistics would say that the way I use language reflects or makes my identity as
a particular kind of social subject ... the critical account suggests that language is one of the
things that constitutes my identity as a particular kind of subject. Sociolinguistics says that how
you act depends on who you are; critical theory says that who you are (and are taken to be)
depends on how you act.” 20

This is about my stepping back into language by swimming away from the abuser’s so-called
“logical” sense. This is about a writer whose words fell out of her mouth one at a time, just one at a time, until
she thought she had none left. She turned to find them and was met with the blank bright face of silence.
Powerful, uncommon metaphor requires attentiveness, a willingness to play, a willingness to risk: all things
that those in power seem to wish to squelch in we who are the victims of their abuses. Metaphor can collude
with silence, in its occlusion of some aspect of a concept or entity, but it can also be the opposite of silence:
speaking truth to power in a fresh and erotic way, which power cannot help but attend to, if even for the
instant of metaphorical resolution. And an instant’s all it takes to change the world and ourselves.

Notes
1
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister/Outsider, ed. Audre Lorde (Trumansburg,
NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53-59.
2
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.
3
Ibid.
4
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador USA/Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1988), 93. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1457b.6-7.
5
Alice Deignan, “Metaphors of Desire,” in Language and Desire: Encoding sex, romance and intimacy, eds.
Keith Harvey & Celia Shalom (London: Routledge, 1997), 23.
6
The topic is the entity referred to metaphorically.
7
The vehicle is the word/concept used to refer metaphorically to the topic.
8
Deignan, 23.
9
Linda Alcoff & Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs 18:2(1993), 265.
10
Deignan, 22.
11
Lakoff & Johnson, 239.
12
Alicia Ostriker, “A Meditation on Metaphor,” in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, ed. Molly McQuade
(Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000), 158.
13
Lorde, 53
14
Lorde, 54.
15
Fanny Howe, “As like as not,” in Appetite: Food as Metaphor, eds. Phyllis Stowell & Jeanne Foster
(Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002), 86.
16
Ostriker, 157.
17
Cixous 1976, 887.
18
Annette Kuhn, “Introduction to Hélène Cixous’ ‘Castration or Decapitation?’, ” Signs 7.1 (1981): 38.
19
Cixous 1981, 53.
 Jennifer M. Collins 51

20
Keith Harvey & Celia Shalom (eds.), Language and Desire: Encoding sex, romance and intimacy (London:
Routledge, 1997), 5.

References
Alcoff, Linda & Gray, Laura. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260-
290.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-
893.
Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?” Translated by Annette Kuhn. Signs 7.1 (1981): 41-55.
Deignan, Alice. “Metaphors of Desire.” In Language and Desire: Encoding sex, romance and intimacy, edited
by Keith Harvey & Celia Shalom, 21-42. London: Routledge, 1997.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Howe, Fanny. “As like as not.” In Appetite: Food as Metaphor, edited by Phyllis Stowell & Jeanne Foster, 86.
Rochester – New York: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002.
Kuhn, Annette. “Introduction to Hélène Cixous’ ‘Castration or Decapitation?’.” Signs 7.1 (1981): 36-40.
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lorde, Audre. Sister/Outsider. Trumansburg – New York: The Crossing Press, 1984.
Olmos, Margarite Fernández & Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth (eds.) Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writing by Latin
American Women. Fredonia – New York: White Wine Press, 1993.
Ostriker, Alicia. “A Meditation on Metaphor.” In By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly
McQuade, 157-162. Saint Paul – MN: Graywolf Press, 2000.
Schneider, Pat. The Writer as an Artist: A new approach to writing alone and with others. Los Angeles: Lowell
House, 1993.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador USA/Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1988.
 The Erotic and the Pornographic: an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Katarzyna Wieckowska and Przemyslaw Zywiczynski

So perhaps we must make up our minds to the idea that altogether it is not possible for the
claims of the sexual instinct to be reconciled with the demand of culture, that in consequence of
his cultural development, renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of his extinction at
some far future time, are not to be eluded by the race of man.1

In his Contributions to the Psychology of Love, Sigmund Freud makes an interesting critical gesture
which underlies not only all his work, but which also seems essential for the culture which his writings claim to
describe: the gesture, visible also in the quotation that frames this article, equates culture with the masculine and
relegates women to the dangerous domain of nature. In psychoanalysis, the feminine figure marks the relation
between culture and nature as an inherently antagonistic one. Nature, to which sexual instinct belongs, comes to
be represented by women, and thus everything that threatens the domain of culture acquires a ‘feminine’ quality.
In the economy of culture proposed by Freud, “woman is altogether taboo,”2 and it is against the unregulated
feminine danger that a man – and his culture – have to protect themselves: to refer to Freud again, “Man fears
that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then
proving himself a weakling.”3
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the opposition between sex and culture is extrapolated into the opposition
between nature (feminine) and civilization (masculine); the relation between these two is one of constant
struggle in which the dangerous feminine other has to be controlled and regulated by the civilized men. At the
same time, it is from nature/woman that culture begins, always defining itself against the feminine point of
origins while attempting to hide its ‘natural’ beginnings. The woman thus occupies the paradoxical place of a
(natural) centre external and alien to what it produces, to culture whose work can be described as that of
supplementing, of substituting for its non-existent ‘origins’.4 In the context of art, to which the erotic (arguably)
belongs, the feminine taboo “represents the distinction between that which can be seen and that which is
just beyond presentation,”5 between that which is permissible and that which is forbidden. In her study of
painting, Lynda Nead observes that “the female nude marks both the internal limit of art and the external limit of
obscenity.”6 The erotic can be said to perform for culture the same function that the female nude performs for
art: it represents the limits of culture, sublimating the desires dangerous to its functioning into a work of art, and
it sets the limits of sexual representation. In the context of contemporary academia – and, as we argue, also in
contemporary cultural context - the erotic occupies the space of the sanctioned sexually explicit text: an objet
d’art, its function is no longer to stimulate sexual excitement, but rather to give aesthetic delight. Springing from
the forbidden wish to violate the social taboos that dominate a particular historical period, the erotic points to a
possible transgression of the established norms and thus re-defines the field of possible significations, of
culture.7 Yet due to its ‘canonized’ status, the erotic power of transgression is significantly curbed, and it is the
pornographic, the illegitimate other of the erotic, that to a much greater degree engages with the socially
forbidden content that endangers, and simultaneously founds, the practices of culture. To use the imagery of
limits again, the pornographic occupies the outer limit of the erotic, of that which is situated on the outskirts of
sociality. If the erotic points to the limits of culture, the pornographic crosses these limits, or, to be more precise,
it presents a fantasy of taboo violation and of a return to the chaos before socialization.
Pornography, originally a description of prostitutes, sends us back to the antagonism between sexual
instinct and culture and, at least in the movies selected for this paper, to the position of women.8 The connection
between pornography and women has been succinctly summarised by Andrea Dworkin who states that “the idea
that pornography is 'dirty' originates in the conviction that the sexuality of women is dirty and is actually
portrayed in pornography; that women's bodies (especially women's genitals) are dirty and lewd in themselves.”9
The fear of female sexuality, of ‘dangerous’ femininity, expresses the fear of nature erupting into culture, of the
uncontrollable factor that threatens the culture’s stability. As, according to Lacan, “there is no such thing as The
woman,”10 femininity is best understood as a social construct, an object of fantasy which incorporates culture’s
fears, as well as its dreams of transgression. It is this status of the woman as a fantasy object that is repeatedly
used in pornography. In Intimate Strangers, the depiction of sexual scenes is enabled by the fantasies of the
movie’s heroine, a writer whose fictional characters come to life. By mixing reality with fiction, the film points
to the constructed nature of the border between the real and the imagined, as well as stages the ultimate fantasy
of complete abandonment of the ‘reality principle’ (the social censor) and of instantaneous wish fulfilment. As
the heroine comments: “Everything I write, becomes real and everything I tell them [the fictional characters] to
do, they do.” Similarly, in Ancient Secrets of the Kamasutra, the sexual fantasy is instigated by the reading of a
book. By the end of both movies, the border between reality and fiction is re-established and the viewers are
assured that the violation of sexual taboos can happen only in the realm of fantasy.
54 The Erotic and the Pornographic: an Interdisciplinary Perspective

The use of fantasy framework allows for a momentary disturbance of social laws and for lack of
punishment for their violation. In this respect, La Marionnette is an interesting exception as it fails to
convincingly acknowledge the fictional status of the sexual fantasy. It is a story of a female puppet imprisoned in
a box by a magician; the puppet tells her story to her owner, a man, and, by telling her story, sets herself free so
that by the end of the movie it is the man who is imprisoned in the miniature world of the box. The film not only
never resolves the confusion between fiction and fantasy, but it also presents an interesting economy of the look.
The gaze of the spectator, identified by Laura Mulvey as the masculine gaze,11 is internalised in the film as the
gaze of the male characters (the magician, the count, the owner of the box); thus male scopophilia turns the
female puppet into an object, appropriates her and her pleasure (and punishes only her for its fulfilment). The
end, however, reverses the configuration of power so that now it is the woman who is the subject of the gaze that
objectifies the man. If pornography is a ‘social’ genre in that sexual relations are necessarily an expression of
social relations, La Marionnette re-writes the dominant narrative by freeing the measures of punishment from
their gender bias. It literally stages the punishment of a-social desire by removing the man outside culture;
paradoxically, it is nature – the woman – that disciplines culture, yet a nature that is retrospectively re-imagined
as the origins of both transgression and of social rules.
The qualification of pornography as transgressional behaviour can be illustrated through comparing sex
eliciting discourse (including both Verbal Communication and Non Verbal Communication) in pornographic
movies with the prototypical courtship scenario. The latter is based mainly on biological anthropology (Schlefen,
Givens), with reference to linguistic axiology (Krzeszowski), in particular axiology of discourse, which views a
communicative occurrence in terms of axiological clashes.
The courtship ritual precedes close contact (difficulty to separate early phases of courtship from
friendship) and can be defined as an exaggeratedly affilative and submissive-like social orientation, signalled
both by verbal and non-verbal cues, that may culminate in sexual intercourse.12 In axiological terms, sex
elicitation represents the situation of a clash, which consists in the conflict between the need to close the
distance, both literally, in proxemic terms, and metaphorically, in psychological terms, and the fight-or-flight
reaction – the reaction of the sympathetic nervous system occasioned by intrusion of the personal zone.13 The
fight-or-flight reaction, common to most vertebrae, results from the spacing mechanism of territoriality14 –
transgressing entering one’s personal zone is considered a potential attack and sets in operation the aggression
mechanism. In the proper courtiship scenario, it is necessary for potential mates to go through the phase of
exhibiting welcoming signs, the function of which is to demote aggression and elicit friendly reaction. The
principal courting tactic is infantilism, i.e. adopting various behavioural patterns peculiar to the young, thereby
eliciting suitably friendly reactions and facilitating sexual advances.15 Although courtship is a collaborative
effort of the male and the female, since the female’s brood-tending instinct is stronger, the male is more prone to
activate the infantile schema.16
As noted, courtship is a type of discourse, verbal and non-verbal, which consists in exchange of
welcoming signals which for a large part utilise the infantile schema. Courtship comprises the phases of
attention, recognition, conversation, touching, and love-making.
The attention phase consists of efferent (outgoing) cues, the role of which is to proclaim one’s physical
presence, sex, and good will. As regards physical presence, men tend to be stationary; they often set up mini-
territories through artifact scatter in their reach space (drink glasses, napkins, food, etc.) and from such fixed
courting stations they view the scenery. Women tend to be mobile alert to non-verbal reactions to their
movements and gaze. Sex is announced through exaggerated marks of sexual identity: exposed natural signs,
grooming signals (makeup, hair cues, facial hair), and apparel (high heels, baseball caps, scarves). Women’s
make-up often appeals to the infantile schema (wide-set eyes and full lips, smooth unblemished skin, prominent
cheekbones). The male should ideally combine the rugged looks to intimidate rivals (square jaw – beard,
medium brow ridges) and the infantile qualities (wide-set, large eyes, medium nose, or suede-smooth skin.
17
Good will is communicated through welcome signs, such as head-tilt, palm-up, shoulder-shrug, and smile. 18
The recognition phase consists of afferent (incoming) signals in reaction to the afferent signals emitted
in the attention phase. A potential partner is observed for the positive response signs: sings of reciprocation and
of submission. When willingness to be approached is detected, the proper sex eliciting discourse may begin. This
is done in the conversation phase of courtship. The onslaught, or the approach, locks the pair in a mini-territory.
In proxemic terms, the duo balances on the verge of personal distance and intimate distance (hands can reach and
hold extremities), while the voice verges on the conventional modified tone and the intimate tone. The oral
gambit prototypically involves humour, soliciting a partner’s opinion, showing sensitivity to a partner’s
perspective, warmth displays.19 The oral gambit contains elaborate politeness mechanisms. The commonality
between the duo is sought through positive politeness strategies (i.e. directed towards the addressee’s positive
face, the most common include: attending to the hearer’s wants, interests, needs, etc., seeking agreement and,
conversely, avoiding disagreement, asserting common ground, joking.20 Although conversation is a part of
courtship, direct reference to sex is tabooised, while indirect reference is accomplished via off-record politeness
 Katarzyna Wieckowska and Przemyslaw Zywiczynski 55

strategies, e.g. violations of Quality Maxim (metaphors, contradictions) and violations of Manner Maxim
(ambiguity, vagueness, use of ellipsis).
The phase of touching begins when the symptoms of the flight reactions have been eliminated. This
marks the capitulation phase of sex eliciting discourse; the distance decreases to the close intimate phase. The
first touch is directed at the neutral part of the body, and only when accepted (head-tilt, shoulder-shrug, returning
the touch) is it repeated, prolonged, and directed to more private regions. Hugging, common in almost all
primates, is an infantile sign of being needed; kissing, which evolved as nurturing cues in the mother-infant
bond, performs a similar role, while swaying stimulates pleasure centres linked to the inner ear’s vestibular
sense.
As a part of courtship ritual, sex eliciting discourse is compulsory, and an attempt at bypassing it is
stigmatised (deranged sexual behaviour in certain psychiatric conditions).
The films chosen at random are characterised by the lack of sex eliciting discourse. Sexual intercourse,
in most cases between strangers, is instigated without proper courtship ritual. The attention phase briefly centres
on the female sex attributes. Both natural marks (augmented breasts and lips, prominent hips) as well as
grooming marks (strong make-up, long hair) and apparel (almost invariably high heels) are exaggerated. Make-
up, which emphasis cheekbones, eyes, and lips instigates the infantile scenario, whereas the prominence of breast
and hips are to evoke the motherly schema. The male attributes are disregarded at this stage. The signs of good
will are absent. The phase of recognition and conversation are left out. In all instances, the attention phase is
followed by the final stages of the touching phase, i.e. the phase of passionate kissing (the performance is
invariably exaggerated) – there is no first touch phenomenon, and the stage of hugging is reduced. The beginning
of the love-making scene is often depicted as a sudden and uncontrollable impulse (e.g. the magic spell in La
Marionette). The love-making scene is presented in real or extended time. Little attention is given to situational
constraints, and personal distance is disregarded. In the two cases (Ancient Secrets and La Marionette), superior
social position is a conducive but not decisive factor of sex elicitation.
The above description suggests that the pornographic model of sex-elicitation depends on a different
axiology than the standard scenario based on the five phases of courting. The elements absent in pornography,
i.e. recognition, conversation, and the initial stage of touching, constitute Metaaxiological Interlude, the function
of which is to resolve the AC between the need to elicit sex and the fight-or-flight reaction. In pornographic
discourse sex elicitation appears free from axiological conflict resulting from the fight-or-flight reaction; the
ensuing tabooisation of sex is absent, whereby courtship ritual, an attempt to resolve the axiological conflict, is
redundant. Thus, pornographic discourse proceeds, in a straightforward and swift fashion, from the initial state of
the need to elicit sex to the goal state of love-making.
It should be stressed that the model described here accords with the overall axiology of sex elicitation. The
starting and the goal points are the same. The difference is that, contrary to the prototypical model, the
pornographic discourse travels towards the goal on the optimal trajectory, with full speed and economy. A
further difference concerns the distribution of initiative. An important observation to be made about the
pornographic scenario is that sex is instigated by women:
- the librarian guide through the world of ancient India (Ancient Secrets),
- the woman writer in Intimate Strangers,
- the enchanted doll in La Marionette.
The dominant role of the woman is emphasised by the fact that the above personas take up the role of the
narrator. Men lack initiative, passively perform their duty, often make a sudden appearance and are shown only
partially. This is contrary to the prototypical model of courtship, where the onslaught, which marks the
beginning of the phase of conversation, is statistically performed more often by men than women. Men also tend
to be more active during the capitulation, which takes place in the ensuing phase of touching.
A possible explanation of these differences could be that pornography presents a deranged form of sexual
behaviour. It is mitigated, however, by the fact that the scenario does not take place in a realistic but an
imaginary setting (thereby pornography should not be explained as a psychopathic discourse mode). In the four
films analysed here, the setting is characterised by marks of irreality – physical distancing in space and time:
- Ancient Secrets – a maharaja’s palace in ancient India,
- La Marionette – a haunted castle,
or cognitive distancing:
- Intimate Strangers – the writer’s hallucinations and daydreaming.
Despite the insistence in pornography on graphicness and real-time tempo, the unity of time and place is often
defied (e.g. the rapidly changing locations, broken up and reappearing event in Fever Island); occasionally, the
physical laws are defied (the waterfall flowing upstream in Fever Island). The overall effect is the impression
that the action is really confined to a play of imagination in the female protagonist’s heads. This observation,
coupled with the fact that pornography is almost exclusively addressed to men, allows us to properly view the
problem of intertextuality. Pornographic movies seem to depict men’s own sentiments of how they would like
women to imagine sex elicitation. Pornography illustrates a maximally receptive female. As a result, sex
56 The Erotic and the Pornographic: an Interdisciplinary Perspective

elicitation does not have to go through the various stages of reducing the fight-or-fright reaction, no risk of
failure is involved, either. In pornography, sex is not elicited, sex just happens. Thus, despite appearances, the
pornographic setting is dominated by men: the women of pornographic movies are construed to fit exactly male
expectations – the axiology free from clashes, there is no need to get involved into dialogic negotiations. The
women, as a site dangerous to culture, are always imagined from the perspective of men and the culture they
represent. Therefore, the transgression represented in/by pornographic movies is always already inscribed in and
regulated by the culture it seemingly challenges. Additionally, the danger always takes the form of a fantasy.
This points to the futility of the rebellion, but also redefines the field of possible significations, thus slowly re-
writing the symbolic space of cultural production.

Notes
1
Sigmund Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, eds.
Sigmund Freud & Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 59.
2
Ibid., 65.
3
Ibid., 66.
4
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974).
5
Lynda Nead, “Getting Down to Basics: Art, Obscenity and the Female Nude,” in Feminisms, eds. Sandra Kemp
& Judith Squires (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 442-446.
6
Ibid.
7
Following the definition proposed by Raymond Williams, we understand culture as social practice, as the
production of meaning in everyday life.
8
For the sake of brevity, we will deal with heterosexual pornographic material only.
9
Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography,” in Feminisms, eds. Sandra Kemp & Judith Squires (Oxford – New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 326.
10
Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école
freudienne, eds. Juliett Mitchell & Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan Press, 1983), 144.
11
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, eds.
Antony Easthope & Kate McGowan (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), 158-166.
12
David Givens, “The Nonverbal Basis of Attraction: Flirtation, Courtship, and Seduction,” Psychiatry 41
(1978): 346-359.
13 9
Arthur C. Guyton, Textbook of Medical Physiology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1996 ).
14
Heini Hediger, Studies of the Psychology and Behaviour of Captive Animals in Zoos and Circuses (London:
Butterworth, 1955).
15
Hans Hass, The Human Animal (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970), 75.
16
Ibid.
17
Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology: The Biology of Behavior (San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1970), 119.
18
Ibid.
19
Bruce Bower, “Brain Structure Sounds Off to Fear, Anger,” Science News 151 (1997): 38.
20
Stephen C. Levinson & Penelope Brown, Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 102.
 PART IV

The Erotic in Literature

 Deleuze in Waiting

Lorraine Markotic

In his essay “Coldness and Cruelty,” Gilles Deleuze explores the phenomenon of masochism through
an analysis of the writings of Sacher-Masoch, especially Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs. Deleuze puts forward a
theory of the specificity of masochism, attacking the common assumption that sado-masochism is a unitary
phenomenon. He systematically refutes the idea that sadism and masochism are intertwined, or even that they
are two sides of the same coin. Here Deleuze is consistent with the anti-Hegelian tendency present in many of
his works, where he strongly opposes prevalent notions of opposites that interact to form dialectical syntheses,
and he insists on the absolute autonomy of masochism and sadism.
In his view they are mutually exclusive and at the same time asymmetric. Deleuze also argues against
Freud’s and Reik’s view that masochism is sadism turned against oneself, and that sadism is masochistic insofar
as the sadist identifies with the victims. The conglomerate “sado-masochism” is a pseudo-phenomenon, in
Deleuze’s view, one that stems from sloppy thinking. Sado-masochism may sometimes be observed, but it is not
a condition, simply a vague symptom of something more precise; one would be similarly mistaken, Deleuze
argues, to regard fever as an illness rather than an indication that an illness is present and yet to be specified.
Deleuze cites the – in his view stupid – joke about the masochist who says to the sadist: “hurt me” and
the sadist who says, of course, “no.” A masochist would never look for a sadist, Deleuze insists. Neither would a
sadist seek a masochist. Masochism constitutes a realm unto itself, with corresponding figures, props and
processes. A masochist seeks someone who will complement his (and the male pronoun is necessary here, for
Deleuze speaks only of the male masochist) desire, not an actual sadist or even someone who acts like a sadist.
Whereas a sadist seeks to violate his victims and to do so over and over again, a masochist seeks the
perfect person (according to Deleuze, the perfect woman), whom he can form into his ideal partner. The
masochist attempts to form an alliance with someone through a contractual agreement. Only then can
masochistic play begin. An entire context is constructed, within which the masochistic practice unfolds. Indeed,
Deleuze writes that “there is no specifically masochistic fantasy, but rather a masochistic art of fantasy” 1
Moreover, the theatre of masochism, in which the masochist is both actor and director, contains plenty of
suspense. A masochist delays and wards off pleasure as long as possible. “Waiting and suspense are essential
characteristics of the masochistic experience,” 2 Deleuze writes. Masochism, then, is characterized by quality
rather than quantity, by an alliance, by some form of contract, and by a situation of suspended pleasure. And
even if there are moments where the masochist becomes the torturer (at the end of Venus in Furs, for example),
Deleuze argues that if one looks closely at these instances it becomes evident that they remain actions within the
masochistic domain. These apparently “sadistic” actions are quite different from the sadism of the sadist, just as
the instances where the sadist inflicts pain upon himself share nothing with the world of masochism, remaining
within the sadistic domain.
Deleuze’s systematic depiction of the particulars of masochism, his delineation of its inner logic, is
exceedingly convincing. Masochism does seem to have roots and reasoning that are completely different from
those of sadism. Yet I do not see why one could not find both tendencies within an individual, just as Hegel’s
master-slave dialectic need not involve a master and a slave but can be interpreted as residing within a single
person. Deleuze is too strident in his separation of masochism and sadism, I think, and there are some other
problems I have with his theory as well. The most significant one is his assumption that the masochist is male
and that he must necessarily seek a woman, more specifically a woman who represents the good oral mother (as
opposed to the uterine mother or oedipal mother, according to Deleuze), to enact his masochism. Though
Deleuze would probably consider these aspects crucial to his analysis of masochism, I would disagree, and I
would argue that much of Deleuze’s theory of masochism remains informative and interesting without these
elements.
Here I shall turn to Ha Jin’s novel Waiting, which can be illuminated by Deleuze’s theory of
masochism and which can also, I shall argue, indicate a limitation to Deleuze’s theory.
As already indicated, the masochist attempts to delay pleasure as long as possible, to create a situation
of anticipation: “We should say, however, that there is no such thing as a specifically masochistic kind of
waiting, but rather that the masochist is morose, by which we mean that he experiences waiting in its pure
form.” 3 This is clearly the case with Lin, the protagonist of Waiting. He has been waiting almost eighteen years
to consummate his relationship. Lin is a medical doctor in the Chinese revolutionary army. He is in an arranged
marriage, but is separated from his wife and lives in the army quarters. He is in love with Manna, a nurse who
also lives in the army quarters. But because they are neither married nor engaged, the regulations do not permit
them to be alone together or even to walk outside the compound together. Lin wants a divorce, so he can marry
Manna, but his wife must consent. Once a year, when he returns to his village, he ask he wife to agree to a
60 Deleuze in Waiting

divorce; she accompanies him to the courthouse, but when they stand before the judge, she does not pronounce
her agreement and her brother takes up her defence against the divorce. Hence, Lin must go on waiting.
Freud had already noted the extent to which situations in which individuals seem to be victims are
often actually constructed by these same individuals. Deleuze’s analysis of masochism stresses the extent to
which the masochist is in control, the extent to which the masochist constructs his environment, especially the
suspense and delay of the situation. Lin seems to be the victim of his circumstances, but perhaps he is less the
victim than he seems. When he is described attempting to get a divorce, he does not seem to have tried that hard.
And after his attempt fails, he goes out to eat together with his wife and her brother.

After finishing his first bowl of noodles, Bensheng [his wife’s brother] broke the silence,
saying to Lin, “Elder brother, don’t take to heart what I said in the court. Shuyu’s my sister
and I had to do that.’ His thin eyes were glittering as he chewed a piece of pork heart.
‘I understand,’ said Lin.
‘So, no hard feelings.’
‘No.’
‘We’re still one family.’
‘Yes’
Shuyu smiled and sucked her noodles vigorously. Lin shook his head and heaved a sigh. 4

This scene takes place after Lin and Shuyu have been separated for seventeen years; after eighteen
years a man obtain a divorce without his wife’s consent, so Manna herself realizes that Lin will not really try
that hard that year.

By 1983, Lin and his wife had already been separated for seventeen years, so with or without
Shuyu’s agreement, he would be able to divorce her the next year. That was why Manna was
certain that he wouldn’t make a great effort this time. She knew the workings of his mind: he
would always choose an easy way out.” 5

So the delay continues.

Deleuze writes that a situation of suspense makes one tend to identify with the person subject to the
suspense: “the art of suspense always places us on the side of the victim and forces us to identify with him.” 6
This is certainly the case with Waiting. We feel for Lin and for Manna. The prologue of the novel, detailing
Lin’s unsuccessful attempt (once again) to obtain a divorce, takes place in the seventeenth year of Lin’s
separation. Parts I and II then recount Lin’s meeting Manna and their romance. When, three-quarters through the
novel, Lin is finally about to obtain his divorce, we, the readers, become uneasy, expecting something to
happen, something to intervene, something to further prevent him from fulfilling his desire with Manna.
Suspense and delay are constitutive of the novel, just as Deleuze regards them as constitutive of Masoch’s own
novel Venus in Furs, Deleuze writes: “The most vigilant censor could hardly take exception to Venus, unless he
were to question a certain atmosphere of suffocation and suspense which is a feature of all Masoch’s novels.” 7
Clearly, then, Venus in Furs can hardly be considered a violent text. In fact, Deleuze insists that the
masochist does not find pleasure in pain, but that pain must precede pleasure; pain is not the cause, but the
necessary precursor of pleasure. And herein, Deleuze argues, lies what he sees as the humour of the masochist
(just as there is the irony of the sadist). The masochist is not the obedient subject he seems. Masochism involves
mockery and mock obedience. Pain, usually considered a manner of punishing pleasure, the masochist turns into
a condition of his pleasure, thus subverting any power that would punish desire. Deleuze writes: “The essence of
masochistic humour lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction of a desire under threat of
subsequent punishment is converted into one which demands the punishment first and then orders that the
satisfaction of the desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment.” 8 The masochist twists the punishment
of desire into the precondition of his pleasure.
By the end of the Waiting, one can perhaps see Lin as having transformed the restriction on his
pleasure, the laws that prohibit a man and a woman who are not married from fulfilling their sexual desire, into
a source of his pleasure. He is forced to wait but waiting has perhaps become a precursor to his pleasure.
According to Deleuze, one of the most crucial aspects of masochism, one not noted by Reik, who wrote
extensively and insightfully on masochism, is the contract. “The masochist appears to be held by real chains, but
in fact he is bound by his word alone.” 9 Both in his novels and in his life, Masoch wrote elaborate contracts in
 Lorraine Markotic 61

which he spelled out his relation with his torturer. Deleuze argues that whereas the sadist is concerned with
breaking laws and with setting up institutions, masochism is concerned with making contractual agreements. For
this too, Deleuze has an interesting interpretation. According to him, and here he follows Lacan to a great
extent, the contract is a way of excluding the father as representative of the law. The masochist’s contract with
the woman who represents the oral mother - and I assume that Deleuze here means pre-Oedipal mother - is his
way of excluding the father, of banning him and his laws. Although many interpretations of masochism link
masochism to the father, especially to a punitive father, Deleuze regards masochism as involving a repudiation
of the father, indeed a rebirth of the self through the mother alone.
Again, without necessarily accepting what Deleuze writes about the oral mother, it is interesting to
examine Waiting in terms of what he says about the contract excluding the law of the father. What actually
prevent Lin and Manna from being together is the rule of the Party Committee:

Though they were an acknowledged couple, they couldn’t live together and could only eat at
the same table in the mess hall and take walks on the hospital grounds. The hospital’s
regulations prohibited a man and a woman on the staff from walking together outside the
compound, unless they were married or engaged. This rule had been in force for nineteen
years since 1964, when a nurse got pregnant by her boyfriend, who was an assistant doctor.
After the pregnancy was discovered, the couple confessed they had met several times in the
birch woods east of the hospital. Both were expelled from the army—the man became a
village doctor in his hometown in Jilin Province while the woman was set to Yingkou City,
where she packed seafood in a cannery. Then the Party Committee of the hospital made this
rule: two comrades of different sex, unless married or engaged, must not be together outside
the compound. 10

But instead of focusing on the restrictive rule, Lin focuses on the contract he has made with his wife,
regarding this as that which keeps him and Manna apart. The opening sentence of the novel is: “Every summer
Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” 11 Focusing on the contract with his wife rather
than the restrictive and oppressive rules of the compound might be interpreted as a way to ignore or deny the
rules of the father. At one point, Manna, in frustration arranges for she and Lin to meet secretly in an apartment
in the city. Lin, however, refuses to break the word he has given to his superior that there will not be anything
“abnormal” (ie sexual) between him and Manna. Although the risk of getting caught may be a factor in Lin’s
decision, the verbal contract he has made rather than the rules seem to be what restrain him.
Deleuze’s theory of masochism throws light on the novel in terms of the element in waiting and the
idea of the role the contract plays in masochism. In terms of another aspect, however, I think Waiting illustrates
a limitation Deleuze’s theory.
Deleuze regards fetishism as an integral part of masochism. But fetishism is more important than that
for Deleuze. Whereas sadism involves demonstration, masochism involves imagination, suspending reality and
envisioning the world differently. Indeed Deleuze regards the very structure of fetishism as constitutive of our
ability to suspend reality and imagine things other than they are. According to Freud, fetishism is the result of
the child’s denial of the absence of the maternal phallus. The fetish (the shoe, the stocking, the fur or whatever)
is that last object that the child sees before it “sees” the absence of the penis. The fetishist knows that it saw that
the mother did not have a penis, but wants to cling to the moment before this knowledge. Hence, what occurs is
not repression, but something different, a state of suspended knowledge that makes imagination and idealization
possible. 12 (186).
This knowing and not knowing is present in masochism, I believe, but not simply in the fetishistic
props of the masochist. In my view, what the masochist recognizes and at the same time does not recognize,
knows and does not know, is the suffering he inflicts through his masochism. Deleuze discusses the apparently
sadistic acts of the masochist, but he does not address the sadism that may inhere in masochism, the tendency to
make others suffer. It seems to me, however, that there is ineluctably a sadistic aspect to the masochist, simply
because he uses another person as an instrument for his pleasure. Deleuze argues that whereas the sadist needs
to dominate others, the masochist needs to find the woman he can educate. A better word might be train, for the
masochist forms the woman in accordance with his scenario purposes, with little regard for her own desire. And
because the masochist constructs his world in accordance with his own desire, he necessarily disregards the
desires of others when he includes them in it.
This is the case with Lin. This is not to say that Lin is not aware that in some sense he is being unfair to
Manna by wanting her to wait for him, or that he does not realize that her situation is an exceedingly difficult
62 Deleuze in Waiting

one. But Lin does not acknowledge the extent to which he has created the situation in accordance with his own
desire. I think that the masochist both realizes and suspends his knowledge that he wilfully makes other suffer.
This does become evident at the end of the novel, however. But until then we empathize with Lin, and with
Manna. Near the conclusion of Waiting, Lin visits his daughter and Shuyu. He thinks Mannu will not live much
longer he is worried about their two infants. He says to Shuyu, now his ex-wife.

“Sweetheart, will you wait for me. I’ll come back to you soon. We are still, still one family,
aren’t we? Don’t leave me. Manna’s going to die in a year or two. Oh what – what should I do
about the twins?” 13 (306)

I think that the masochist and Lin both realize and suspend their knowledge about their role in making others
suffer. The novel ends with the sentences:

“Outside, Manna was cheerfully wishing ‘Happy Spring Festival’ to someone passing by. She
sounded so pleasant that Lin noticed her voice was still resonant with life.”

So the waiting, the masochism, and the sadism, will go on and on.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism - Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 72.
2. Ibid, 70.
3. Ibid, 72.
4. Ha Jin, Waiting (London: Vintage, 2000), 14.
5. Ibid, 15.
6. Deleuze, 34.
7. Ibid, 25.
8. Ibid, 88-89.
9. Ibid, 75
10. Jin, 16.
11. Ibid, 3.
12. Ibid, 31-33.
13. Ibid, 306.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Jin, Ha. Waiting. London: Vintage, 2000.
 Erotic Rhetoric.
A Note on the Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

Koen De Temmerman 1
1. Introduction

This paper, which does not pretend to be anything more than a work in progress paper drawing upon an
ongoing Ph.D. research on characterization in the ancient Greek novel, concentrates on two important aspects of
this ancient Greek literary genre. Although the Greek novel has been neglected by classical scholarship for many
decades, it has received increasing attention during the last 40 years. In their article on scholarship to this genre
over the last 25 years, Ewen Bowie and Stephen Harrison amusingly point out that among classical scholars it
has become “one of the hottest properties in town” 2 .
Let me first make some introductory clarifications on this “hot property”. The designation “ancient
Greek novel” refers to a series of ancient Greek stories of love and adventure which were written during the late
hellenistic period and the first centuries A.D. Only five extant Greek novels have come down to us. That is, in
chronological order, the novels by Chariton of Aphrodisias, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and
Heliodorus of Emesa. Of another eleven novels, only fragments or summaries in ancient testimonies are left 3 .
In many respects, the “fabula” of the Greek novels is stereotyped. The protagonists are always a boy
and a girl, placed in a setting that is by preference Asia Minor or the Middle East. Both young heroes are
exceptionally beautiful and of very high birth. In most novels, the protagonists fall in love at first sight.
Afterwards they leave for a long journey. In remote territories, they go through various dangerous adventures.
They are separated for a long time and their mutual fidelity is put to the test by all kinds of rivals. They are
kidnapped by pirates, they are shipwrecked, and threatened by slavery and torture. Finally the two lovers find
each other back – a reward for their mutual fidelity – and it all ends with a happy end.

2. Rhetoric and sexual symmetry

The two aspects of this genre which I will focus on in this paper are, firstly, the highly rhetorical writing
style of the Greek novel, and, secondly, the unique representation of love between the protagonists in this genre.
As G.A. Kennedy points out in a recent study on classical rhetoric, a persistent characteristic of classical
rhetoric consists of its evolution from so-called primary to so-called secondary rhetoric in almost every stage of
its history, i.e. a shifting of the focus of rhetoric from the application of rhetorical techniques in speeches for
specific purposes to their presence in literature. In other words, classical rhetoric shows the tendency of shifting
focus “from persuasion to narration, from civic to personal contexts, and from speech to literature”, a tendency
to which Kennedy refers as the “letteraturizzazione” of rhetoric 4 but of which the result could, I think, equally
be described as the “rhetoricallization” of literature.
The ancient Greek novel constitutes a fine example of this thesis. The novels are permeated by
techniques of ancient rhetoric. The rhetorical climate in which they were written has since long been noticed by
classical scholars 5 and the rhetorical background of the Second Sophistic for the novels has been widely
acknowledged 6 . The term “Second Sophistic” was coined by the early third-century Greek writer Philostratus 7 ,
and refers to a re-creation of the original Sophistic movement of the late fifth century B.C. in the first centuries
A.D. 8 One can firmly state that all novels display various rhetorical features, some to a greater, and others to a
lesser extent.
My second focus regards the representation of love, eros, in the Greek novel. For this aspect, I mainly
draw on research done by the American classical scholars D. Konstan and M.D. Muchow. In his Ph.D.-
dissertation, Muchow points out that the Greek novels present the first instance of mutually faithful love in
Greek literature and he argues that it was exactly this ideal of voluntary love and marriage that made the novels
‘escapist literature’ appealing to readers whose own marriages had been arranged to a far greater extent 9 .
Although I doubt that escapism was the (or a) social function of this genre 10 , the first part of Muchow’s claim
stands.
Confirmation of this thesis has been offered by D. Konstan, who broadens his perspective to the
representation of love in the more or less contemporary genres (the New Comedy, Roman elegy, et cetera 11 ). He
argues that it is exactly the representation of eros between the two protagonists that distinguishes the Greek
novel from all other types of Greek love literature 12 . He concludes that only the Greek novel represents a
reciprocal love between two young people, tested by adventures and culminating into marriage 13 .
Konstan’s starting point is the uniformity of love in the Greek novel. E Ã rwj, that is, conquers equally
the heart of the protagonists, antagonists and personae minores. E Ã rwj is a sexual passion, a desire for
satisfaction, that afflicts both the two heroes and the meanest villains in the story 14 . Moreover, E Ã rwj is
64 Erotic Rhetoric. A Note on the Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

linked up inextricably with the notion of marriage, again not only for the protagonists, but also for their rivals 15 .
Consequently, the difference between eÃrwj of the protagonists and eÃrwj of a brigands’ leader who falls in love
with the heroine, does not lie in the intrinsic nature of their love, nor is the hero’s love for the heroine “more
sincere”, “more serious”, or “deeper” than the love of the greatest villain.
The difference between the intrinsically similar eÃrwj of protagonists and antagonists, lies in its
realisation: only the love of the protagonists for each other is constructed symmetrically, that is, with reciprocal
consent 16 . This reciprocity is underlined by the equal distribution of the narrator’s attention over the feelings of
both protagonists. I think for example of the scenes in which the protagonists meet for the first time, and after
which both protagonists’ feelings of love, distress, and frustration are described 17 .
The symmetrical representation of the protagonists’ love stands in sharp contrast to the antagonists’
love for the hero or heroine. The latter type of love is characterised by a subject-object relation, which means
that a “lover” stands in a position of power towards the beloved. David Konstan labels such love, which moves
unidirectionally from a loving subject to a beloved object, a “transitive” love 18 . Such transitivity was the basis of
the classical Greek sexual mentality between a (free) citizen and a socially inferior individual, namely a woman,
a slave or a pai=j 19 . In the Greek novel, this transitive love of antagonists for the protagonists stands in sharp
contrast with the protagonists’ love for each other, the latter being a reciprocal love between two people who
have an equal social background, equal age, etc. 20 This conception of love fits within the larger framework of the
Stoic symmetrical conception of love and sexuality 21 , which was fairly new at the time, and departed from the
asymmetrical conception of sexuality as it was maintained during previous centuries.

3. Sexual symmetry in the èthopoiiai in Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca

In this paper, I want to illustrate this concept of sexual symmetry by focussing on one novel in
particular, the Ephesiaca. This novel was written by Xenophon of Ephesus in the second century A.D. 22 I will
illustrate the concept of sexual symmetry in this novel by concentrating on the rhetorical technique of èthopoiia.
Èthopoiia literally means the construction of ethos, character, and is one of the so-called
progymnasmata. These were preliminary exercises, which became a fixed part of the rhetorical education by at
least the first century B.C. Èthopoiia consisted of the characterization of (historical, mythological, literary)
characters through speech. In the rhetorical exercise of èthopoiia, students were asked to construct speeches that
certain characters could have uttered in certain situations. Guidelines for students to construct èthopoiia properly
are found in all four ancient handbooks of progymnasmata that have come down to us 23 . These guidelines deal
with the suitability of the character’s words 24 and to the structure of its speech 25 .
Recent research drew attention to the influence of these progymnasmata in the Greek novels 26 . G.
Anderson’s playful phrasing of the subject is illustrative: “The sophistic Eros is not just quiver and arrows and a
bare bottom; there is a satchel crammed with progymnasmata as well.” 27
I will focus on the presence of the so-called simple èthopoiia in Xenophon of Ephesus. According to
Ps.-Hermogenes, simple èthopoiiai are èthopoiiai in which the character does not speak to another character, but
to him/herself 28 . In other words, a simple èthopoiia involves direct speech of a character to itself, i.e. a
soliloquium. In Xenophon, sixteen soliloquia are found. Only two of them are not uttered by the protagonists 29 .
Six soliloquia are uttered by the male protagonist Habrocomes 30 , eight by the heroine Anthia 31 .
The first two soliloquia in the novel illustrate my point that the soliloquia of the protagonists contribute
to the construction of sexual symmetry in Xenophon’s novel. Love of protagonists for each other is constructed
symmetrically already at the outset of the love story, that is, after Habrocomes and Anthia have met for the first
time. The narrator marks this important moment by two soliloquia. The beautiful Habrocomes, of whom it is said
earlier that he despises Eros 32 , speaks first. He experiences the power of the god for the first time now but is
unwilling to surrender. I quote:

Labw\n dh\ th\n ko/mhn o( (Abroko/mhj kai\ spara/caj th\n e)sqh=ta "feu= moi tw=n
kakw=n" ei)=pe, "ti/ pe/ponqa dustuxh/j; o( me/xri nu=n a)ndriko\j A ( broko/mhj, o(
katafronw=n /)Erwtoj, o( t%= qe%= loidorou/menoj e(a/lwka kai\ neni/khmai kai\
parqe/n% douleu/ein a)nagka/zomai, kai\ fai/netai/ tij h)/dh kalli/wn e)mou= kai\ qeo\n
)/Erwta kalw=. )\W pa/nta a)/nandroj e)gw\ kai\ ponhro/j: ou) karterh/sw nu=n; ou)
menw= genniko/j; ou)k e)/somai kalli/wn )/Erwtoj; nu=n ou)de\n o)/nta qeo\n nikh=sai/
me dei=. Kalh\ parqe/noj: ti/ de/; toi=j soi=j o)fqalmoi=j, (Abroko/mh, eu)/morfoj
A
) nqi/a, a)ll', e)a\n qe/lvj, ou)xi\ soi/. Dedo/xqw tau=ta: ou)k a)\n )/Erwj pote/ mou
krath/sai." 33

Habrocomes pulled at his hair and tore his clothes; he lamented over his misfortunes and
exclaimed: “What catastrophe has befallen me, Habrocomes, till now a man, despising Eros
 Koen De Temmerman 65

and slandering the god? I have been captured and conquered and am forced to be the slave
of a girl. Now, it seems, there is someone more beautiful than I am, and I acknowledge love
as a god. But now I am nothing but a worthless coward. Can I not hold out this time? Shall I
not show my mettle and stand firm? Will I not remain more handsome than Eros? Now I must
conquer this worthless god. The girl is beautiful; but what of it? To your eyes, Habrocomes,
Anthia is beautiful, but not to you, if your will holds firm. You must make up your mind to
that. Eros must never be my master.” 34

But Eros will be Habrocomes’ master: after these haughty words, the god Eros tortures the young man
even more. At last, Habrocomes recognizes the power of the god and begs him to give Anthia to him.
After having seen Habrocomes, Anthia is in love too:

Die/keito de\ kai\ h( )Anqi/a ponh/rwj: kai\ ou)ke/ti fe/rein duname/nh e)pegei/rei
e(auth/n, peirwme/nh tou\j paro/ntaj lanqa/nein. "Ti/" fhsi\n "w)\ dustuxh\j pe/ponqa;
parqe/noj par' h(liki/an e)rw= kai\ o)dunw=mai kaina\ kai\ ko/rv mh\ pre/ponta.
)Ef' (Abroko/mv mai/nomai kal%= me/n, a)ll' u(perhfa/n%. Kai\ ti/j e)/stai o( th=j
e)piqumi/aj o(/roj kai\ ti/ to\ pe/raj tou= kakou=; Sobaro\j ou(=toj e)rw/menoj,
parqe/noj e)gw\ frouroume/nh: ti/na bohqo\n lh/yomai; ti/ni pa/nta koinw/somai;
pou= de\ (Abroko/mhn o)/yomai;" 35

Anthia too was in a bad way; when she could bear it no longer, she pulled herself together as
she tried to hide her plight from those around her. “What has happened to me?” she
commiserated with herself. “I am in love, although I am too young, and I feel a strange pain
not proper for a young girl. I am madly in love with Habrocomes; he is handsome, but he is
proud. Where will this desire end, what will end my misery? This man I love is disdainful,
and I am a girl kept under watch; whom shall I find to help me? To whom shall I confine
everything, and where shall I see Habrocomes?”

These two soliloquia are representative in a double respect. Firstly, they are representative of the
concept “èthopoiia” since they are constructed according to the prescriptions of èthopoiia as they are found in
the rhetoricians. One of these prescriptions says that the èthopoiia should be structured according to the present –
past – future structure, which means that the èthopoiia should first deal with the present situation of the speaking
character, then with its past, and finally with its future plans to resolve the present problems 36 .

Especially the èthopoiia of Habrocomes is constructed similarly. Habrocomes begins by stating his
present unfortunate condition, refers to his former manliness and despise for Eros, and finally states that he will
not yield to Eros’ power. In the second part of his speech, which I did not quote, he identifies himself as a begger
in front of Eros, refers again to his former despise and arrogance, and asks Eros to give Anthia to him. This
structure reappears in most of the protagonists’ soliloquia in this novel 37 .
Secondly, these èthopoiiai are also thematically representative for all other soliloquia that are uttered by
the protagonists in Xenophon of Ephesus. Just as in the above-mentioned èthopoiiai the protagonists complain
because they are in love with someone who is (still) absent at the moment of speaking, likewise, all other
soliloquia by Habrocomes and Anthia are complaints about the unfortunate condition of the speaker, originating
from his or her separation from the beloved. Apart from the above-quoted soliloquium of Habrocomes, all his
soliloquia deal with his misfortune and present his separation from Anthia as its cause. A recurrent theme in his
soliloquia is the impossibility for him to live with her 38 . These speeches are parallelled by speeches of Anthia, in
which she points out repeatedly that she wants to die if she has to live without her lover 39 . All of Anthia’s
soliloquia too deal with her grief originating from her separation from Habrocomes.
Thus, the thematical similarity of the protagonists’ soliloquia clearly constructs their love for each other
in a symmetrical way. Furthermore, it should be noted that, apart from the complaints about their misadventures,
it is only the mutual love that is thematised in the soliloquia. Although many antagonists fall in love with the
protagonists throughout the story 40 , there is not one of those antagonists whose love is considered in a
soliloquium of the protagonists. In Xenophon, the protagonists talk in their soliloquia only about their own
misadventures and about their grief originating from the separation from each other.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, I started from the acknowledgement of the importance of the rhetorical writing style in the
Greek novels in general. My second starting point was the notion of sexual symmetry in the Greek novel as it is
maintained by research of the last fifteen years. Concentrating on Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca, I pointed
66 Erotic Rhetoric. A Note on the Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

out that the èthopoiiai, which are nearly all put into the mouth of the protagonists, play an important role in the
construction of sexual symmetry.
As in all literature that was written during the period of the Second Sophistic, the ancient Greek novels
display various rhetorical features which were present as “purple patches”, to speak with D.A. Russell 41 ,
throughout the text. It is significant that in Xenophon of Ephesus the “purple patche” of èthopoiia is used to
construct one of the basic ideas of the work. I realize that this conclusion in itself is not world-shattering, but it
does reveal interesting opportunities for further research, firstly into the functioning of èthopoiia, and of direct
speech in general, in the Greek novel. Secondly, we could examine to what extent other rhetorical features (such
as description, chria, or simile) play a role in the construction of sexual symmetry and which rhetorical
techniques construct sexual symmetry in the other novels. Doing so, we could complete the picture of how
ancient rhetoric contributed to construct a basic idea such as sexual symmetry which was destined to dominate
sexual ethics of 2000 years to come.

Notes
1
The author is Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O.-
Vlaanderen). He cordially thanks the supervizor of his Ph.D.-research, prof. dr. Kristoffel Demoen, for his expert
advice and the agreeable cooperation. Any errors or oversights are entirely the author’s own.
2
E.L. Bowie & S.J. Harrison, “The Romance of the Novel,” Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993): 159.
3
N. Holzberg, Der antike Roman: eine Einführung (Düsseldorf – Zürich, 2001) gives an overview of all
(entirely and fragmentarily preserved) ancient Greek novel texts, and situates the genre within its literary and
social context. An overview of the fragmentarily preserved novels and the so-called ‘fringe novels’ (texts that are
not labelled as ‘novels’ by classical scholars but which nevertheless display many novelistic characteristics) is
offered by M.D. Muchow, Passionate Love and Respectable Society in Three Greek Novels (Baltimore,
Maryland, 1988), 224-233.
4
G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times
(Chapel Hill – London, 1999), 3.
5
E. Rohde, the founding father of Greek novel research, pointed to the themes of adventure, suffering, pirates,
and love, and maintained that the novelists drew directly on their experiences in the rhetorical schools. E. Rohde,
Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (Leipzig [Reprinted Darmstadt 1974], 1876), 336-360. Cf. R.F.
Hock, “The Rhetoric of Romance,” in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C. - A.D.
400, ed. S. Porter (Leiden - New York – Köln, 1997), 449-450. Even K. Barwick, “Die Gliederung der narratio
in der rhetorischen Theorie und ihre Bedeutung für die Geschichte des antiken Romans,” Hermes 63 (1928):
261-287, who rejects Rohde’s direct link between the Greek novel and the rhetorical exercises in the schools,
determines the Greek novel in terms used in the rhetorical handbooks as dihgh¢mata plasmatika¢. Cf. Hock, 450.
6
Hock, 450; G. Anderson, Ancient fiction. The novel in the Graeco-Roman world (London – Sydney, 1984), 43.
7
Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum 480-481.
8
Cf. B.P. Reardon, “The Second Sophistic,” in Renaissances before the Renaissance. Cultural Revivals of Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. W.E. Treadgold (Stanford, California, 1984), 23; G. Anderson, The second
sophistic: a cultural phenomenon in the Roman empire (London, 1993), 13-21.
9
Muchow, 1-34 & 218-222.
10
The question of the function of the Greek novel in its social context is linked with the question of the reading
public of the genre and has been taken up by various scholars. For further references, I refer to K. De
Temmerman, “Op zoek naar het publiek van de antieke Griekse roman: een omstreden punt,” Hermeneus 74
(2002): 354-364 and K. De Temmerman, “From Asia with Love. Lotman, Bakhtins chronotoopmodel en de
differentia generica van de Griekse roman,” Handelingen van de Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij
voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis (2004) forthcoming.
11
D. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry. Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton, 1994), 139-186.
12
D. Konstan, “La rappresentazione dei rapporti erotici nel romanzo greco,” Materiali e Discussioni 19 (1987):
20-26; D. Konstan, “Love in the Greek Novel,” in Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society. Special issue of
Differences 2.1, eds. D. Konstan & M. Nussbaum, 1990, 186-188; Konstan 1994, 7 & 14-59.
13
Konstan 1994, 11.
14
Konstan 1990, 191-192; Konstan 1994, 41.
15
On this point, cf. also B. Egger, “Women and marriage in the Greek novel: the boundaries of romance,” in The
Search for the Ancient Novel, ed. J. Tatum (Baltimore – London, 1994), 260-263.
16
M. Fusillo, Il Romanzo Greco. Polifonia ed Eros (Venezia, 1989), 179-234 analyses the representation of eros
in the novels of Chariton, Xenophon, and Achilles Tatius.
 Koen De Temmerman 67

17
Chariton 1.1.6 - 8; Xenophon of Ephesus 1.3.1 – 4.6; Heliodorus 3.5.5 – 6. In Longus, love between the
protagonists is described as a process. Therefore, the story does not contain a first meeting scene, in which the
reciprocity of the protagonists’ love is made explicit. This happens in 1.14.1 – 4 (Chloe) and 1.18.1 – 2
(Daphnis). If Achilles Tatius constitutes an exception to this observation, it does not refute this thesis, for Tatius’
novel is permeated by a striking irony towards the novelistic genre (cf. S. Bartsch, Decoding the ancient novel.
The reader and role of description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Oxford, 1989), K. Chew, “Achilles Tatius
and Parody,” Classical Journal 96 (2000): 57-70, and R. Brethes, “Clitophon ou une anthologie de l'anti-héros,”
in Les personnages du roman grec. Actes du colloque de Tours, 18-20 novembre 1999, ed. B. Pouderon (Lyon,
2001), 181-191. Fusillo, 98-109 shows that Achilles Tatius should be read as an ironical pastiche of the Greek
novel). Moreover, it is striking that only this love story is narrated by a homodiegetic narrator (Clitophon), so
that the initial love is narrated and focalised only by Clitophon (Achilles Tatius 1.4.2 – 5), without any attention
being given to the feelings of the female protagonist. In Tatius’ novel, the symmetry between the two
protagonists is undermined because the use of the homodiegetic narrator blocks a well-balanced representation
from an extradiegetic position of the reciprocal initial love of the protagonists, as is the case in the other novels.
18
Konstan 1994, 9-10, 12, 39, 70, 81-83, etc.
19
For a study of the socio-cultural role of homo-erotical love and sexuality in the classical Greek society, cf. K.
Dover, Greek homosexuality (London, 1978), E.C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient
Greece (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1985), and D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other
Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990).
20
Konstan 1994, 26-30.
21
D. Babut, “Les Stoïciens et l'amour,” Revue des Études Grecques 76 (1963): 55-63 ; G. Giangrande, “La Stoa
e l’amore nel romanzo greco,” Orpheus 21 (2000): 54-59.
22
For information on the dating of Xenophon of Ephesus, cf. B. Kytzler, “Xenophon of Ephesus,” in The Novel
in the Ancient World, ed. G. Schmeling (Leiden, 1996), 336-360; C. Ruiz-Montero, “Xenophon of Ephesus: ein
Überblick,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.34.2 (1994): 1088-1138, and G. Schmeling,
Xenophon of Ephesus (Boston, 1980).
23
The handbooks are, in chronological order, those of Aelius Theon (mid 1st century A.D.), Ps.-Hermogenes
(2nd century), Aphthonius (late 4th century), and Nicolaus (5th century). Cf. Kennedy, 26-27. The most recent
edition (with translation and commentary) of Theon’s progymnasmata is M. Patillon, Aelius Théon.
Progymnasmata (Texte établi et traduit par) (Paris, 1997). For an edition of all four progymnasmata handbooks,
I refer to C. Walz, Rhetores Graeci, vol. I (Stuttgart – Tübingen – London – Paris, 1832), 7-420. L. Spengel,
Rhetores Graeci, vol. II, (Leipzig, 1854), 3-130 edits the progymasmata of Ps.-Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and
Theon, whereas L. Spengel, Rhetores Graeci, vol. III, (Leipzig, 1856), 447-498 edits the progymnasmata of
Nicolaus.
24
Cf. Theon, Prog. 115.22-116.22.
25
Cf. Ps.-Hermogenes, Prog. 16.3-7; Aphthonius, Prog. 45.15-19.
26
Cf. L. Rojas Álvarez, “La influencia de los progymnásmata en la novela de Caritón,” forthcoming (2004) (I
thank L. Rojas Álvarez for sending me a copy of the manuscript before publication), C. Ruiz-Montero, “Caritón
de Afrodisias y los ejercicios preparatorios de Elio Teón,” in Actes del IXe Simposio de la Sección Catalana de
la SEEC, Treballs en Honor de Virgilio Bejarano, vol. 2, ed. L. Ferreres (Barcelona, 1991), 709-713.
27
Anderson 1993, 170.
28
Ps.-Hermogenes, Prog. 15.22-24.
29
Manto in 2.11.2, and Hippothous in 5.9.5. For the text of Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca, I used the edition
by G. Dalmeyda, Xénophon d' Éphèse. Les Éphesiaques ou le roman d' Habrocomes et d' Anthia (Texte établi et
traduit par) (Paris, 1926).
30
1.4.1-5, 3.10.2-3, 5.1.12, 5.8.3-4, 5.10.4-5, 5.10.8.
31
1.4.6-7, 3.5.2-4, 3.8.1-2, 3.8.6-7, 4.6.6-7, 5.5.5, 5.7.2, 5.8.7-9. Among these soliloquia I do not count the
protagonists’ prayers which are uttered in direct speech (4.2.4-5, 4.3.3-4, 5.4.6, 5.4.10-11,
5.11.4)
32
1.1.5-6.
33
1.4.1-4.3.
34
I use the translation of G. Anderson in B.P. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
1989) 125-169.
35
1.4.6-4.7.
36
Ps.-Hermogenes, Prog. 16.3-7; Aphthonius, Prog. 45.15-19. Illustrative in this respect is an example, offered
by Aphthonius, of the words which Niobe would utter after having lost her children (Aphthonius, Prog. 45.20-
46.13). In this example, Niobe says that she is unhappy after the loss of her children and complains that it would
have been better for her if she would never have become a mother. Secondly, she compares her fate with her
68 Erotic Rhetoric. A Note on the Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

father’s and digresses on the reasons of her present fate, which are situated in the past. Finally, she asks herself
what she should do and concludes that death will help her to escape from her present misfortune.
37
3.5.2-4, 3.8.1-2, 3.8.6-7, 3.10.2-3, 4.6.6-7, 5.1.12, 5.5.5, 5.7.2, 5.8.3-4, 5.8.7-9, 5.10.4-5, 5.10.8.
38
5.1.12-13, 5.10.4-5, 5.10.8.
39
3.8.1-2, 5.8.7-9.
40
Throughout the novel, Corymbus, Manto, and Cuno fall in love with Habrocomes, and Euxenus, Moeris,
Perilaus, Psammis, Anchialus, Amphinomus, and finally Polyidus fall in love with Anthia.
41
D.A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), 2.
 Koen De Temmerman 69

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404.
Anderson, G. Ancient fiction. The novel in the Graeco-Roman world. London – Sydney, 1984.
Anderson, G. The second sophistic: a cultural phenomenon in the Roman empire. London, 1993.
Babut, D. “Les Stoïciens et l'amour.” Revue des Études Grecques 76 (1963): 55-63.
Bartsch, S. Decoding the ancient novel. The reader and role of description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius.
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Barwick, K. “Die Gliederung der narratio in der rhetorischen Theorie und ihre Bedeutung für die Geschichte des
antiken Romans.” Hermes 63 (1928): 261-287.
Bowie, E.L. & Harrison, S.J. “The Romance of the Novel.” Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993): 159-178.
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70 Erotic Rhetoric. A Note on the Erotic and the Ancient Greek Novel

Spengel, L. Rhetores Graeci, vol. II. Leipzig, 1854.

Spengel, L. Rhetores Graeci, vol. III. Leipzig, 1856.
Walz, C. Rhetores Graeci, vol. I. Stuttgart – Tübingen – London – Paris, 1832.
 PART V

The Erotic in Visual Art and Film

 Erotic concept of “feminine” in Russian cultural tradition: between Orthodoxy and
Socialism

Marina Novikova

We all know that every world culture has its own image of the erotic, or, at least, there are a number of
general, I would say, archetypal connotations, which are linked in our consciousness to the main stereotypes of
the erotic in different cultures. One of the most powerful images, actually, belongs to a French culture and
represents an exquisite, sensually aesthetic cultural model with such a well-known artistic features as French
Cancan or the Impressionist’s Art. The other opposite model of the erotic represents the American culture with
its “mainstream” Hollywood productions. It’s a cult of basic instinct, where body is an ideal tool of visual
manipulation. (The term of “sex-bomb” is typically American). However, regarding to the Russian model of the
erotic, we can hardly find any typological definition. On the contrary, the whole popular image of Russian
culture, obviously, contradicts to any notions of the erotic nature. On the foreground here usually placed the
emblematic, distinctive features: such as spiritual self – consciousness, mysterious Russian soul, highly
acclaimed moral values. At the first sight, the sensual side of gender in Russian culture is dramatically neglected
and suppressed in a favour of spiritual exploration of an individual. Non-official taboo on the erotic (as well in
arts as in personal self-expression), one way or another goes through the whole history of Russian culture (from
the Christian Orthodox Religion to the ideological Manifests of Socialist Realism). Nevertheless, on the
underground side of Russian cultural space, the world of sensual ideas still exists, even if, mostly, in a secret
form of artistically sublimated creative works. In this sense, the beginning of the 20th century, the silver age of
sensual liberation in Russian arts, deserves the detailed profound research, which I am going to talk about in a
third part of my paper. Meanwhile, the questions I would like to raise in my presentation still stay opened in
Russian and Western contemporary gender research. Is the notion of the erotic, actually, fully applicable towards
the cultorological image of Russia? Was the idea of the erotic empirically grounded in Russian culture or just
mainly “borrowed” from the Western civilization, And if so, did it stay alien on Russian ground just as
unfulfilled dream about the erotic? I also want to point out, that the main purpose of this paper is not an
exhaustive answering, but rather careful posing of these questions. My presentation is, mainly, the notes on
subject, the initial thoughts, a brief outline for future, many-sided research. It consists of a three parts. The first
part explores the place of a woman in Russian Orthodox religious tradition. The second will give some brief
insights on a problem of a Woman and Socialist Realistic Art. And the third one is devoted to the idea of the
feminine during the silver age of Russian arts, the first two decades of 20th century. And, as a visual factor,
without doubts, is the strongest in the perception of the erotic I would like to build up my presentation around a
few famous visual images of Russian Fine Art. (Vladimir Mother of God, female portrait of 30s by Deineka, and
two drawings of Anna Akhmatova - one, made in Parisian studio of 10s by Modigliani and another - in Soviet
Russia of mid-20s by Annenkov). I am willing to show on these examples how the ideological usage of the
feminine in different context, basically, replaced the erotic representation of the body in Russian cultural
tradition.
Generally, the idea of gender, masculine – feminine co-relation always played an especially important
role in Russian art and philosophy. The majority of western and post-Soviet gender studies describe the theory of
the dominant feminine as one of the most influential base of Russian cultural tradition. However, even Russian
concept of the feminine also has its unique specific character, which strongly diversifies from gender models of
Western Europe. Basically, culturological image of Russia embodies a subconscious female element, the co-
called assembled maternal archetype. It is identified with reproductive, protective and consoling nature of the
most popular gender myth of Mother Russia. The most typical ones are the coherent images with a powerful
Motherhood function: Mother - land = Mother Volga (the folkloric name of Russian river) = Virgin Mary, Saint
Mother of God (or in Russian translation, Bogoroditsa). It’s important to notice that, inside the Russian cultural
tradition, the Mother of God was worshiped, the first of all, not as an innocent pure virgin (one of the most
favourable images of Catholicism), but, literally, as Bogoroditsa, a woman, who gave a birth to God. That is a
female saint figure that stands in the beginning of the whole human existence. Russian philosopher Berdyev even
suggested that the Orthodox religion, primary, is the religion of Mother of God, not of Christ, and it is
Bogoroditsa, who became the centre spiritual figure of Russian Christian hierarchy.
Now I would like us to have a look on Vladimir Mother of God, well-known Russian 12th century icon.
74 Marina Novikova

As we can see, the Orthodox tradition obviously neglects, disregards the image of human body.
Especially, if to keep in mind that the Orthodox icon was, actually, the first picture of a man in Russian history,
which, consequently, became the primary artistic - and philosophical – model for the whole future history of
Russian culture. What we can see on this picture is a pure spiritual essence of a human image – shapeless and
fleshless. And of course, I believe, looking at such an icon had a very strong artistic influence on a viewer: the
way he thinks and feels towards his own body image. It proved for him that the main essence of God’s – and
human’s – personality exists outside the borders of the body, so the body is not really meaningful on its own, it
could be simply devaluated. The only meaningful thing is what is out of the cage of the body - the divine spirit.
That’s why the irreconcilable opposition between spiritual – fleshy, high – low, divine – diabolical has its basis
in the Orthodox Religion, and, practically, in Russian Iconography. Especially, regarding the perception of the
feminine in Russian Culture. This tradition was widely reflected in Russian literature, philosophy, and fine arts.
(Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Berdyev).
So, even being such an influential figure in Russian cultural universe, a woman, however, is already
culturally destined to play the only part of spiritual guide, a kind of fleshless angel-protector in Russian cultural
tradition – inspiring and saving a male hero, or even sacrificing herself (and her own happiness) in a name of
higher needs.
Meanwhile, it is important to point out that the church’s attitude towards a female nature was rather
ambiguous. Actually, it was constructed on a base of an absolute opposition: if you are not pure enough – you
are deeply and shamefully sinful. That orthodox statement regarding the female nature, basically, became the
main insoluble dilemma of the best novels by Dostoevsky.
Next, I would like us to move in time to the 30s of the 20th century, the time of foundation of new art of
Soviet Russia, the Art of Socialist Realism.
In Soviet culture a woman, gradually, became a main protagonist figure (her social and cultural role
turned to be as important as never before in Russian History). In the contemporary gender studies Soviet Woman
is called a favourable object of state ideological manipulation. The real masculine partner, basically, replaced for
her by the idea of high social status. This woman is proudly and confidently presented on a foreground in Soviet
cinema, theatre, architecture and fine arts.
But, at the same time, this is a woman without a hero, without a man. The quality of motherhood - in a
Soviet scale of values - still entitled to be the main one (to give a birth to a new warriors of Soviet Society), but
the intimate, erotic side of masculine – feminine opposition is totally absent. In fact, it’s just simply deliberately
removed.
 Erotic Concepts of “feminine” in Russian Cultural Tradition: between Orthodoxy and Socialism 75

Let’s have a look on Deineka’s picture Construction on new workshops, 1926.

At the first sight, we find here something completely opposite to the idea of Russian Religious Art. Here the
female body is fully, we may say, even exuberantly, presented. These young female workers are, obviously
proud of it and consciously demonstrate it. But, in a paradox way, the ideological attitude to a body is quite the
same as on an old Orthodox Icons.
In fact, the body is presented here purely in its social function. It demonstrates indeed the shining youth
and strength of the future builders of Communism, however, that body is not appreciated or admired on its own,
as a visual representation of personal femininity. In this sense, like on the orthodox icons, it barely exists at all.
What kind of artistic massage, actually, the icon is supposed to bring to a viewer? The body is just a frame, just a
visible cage for a spirit. So, as I already said it is officially devaluated.
What kind of artistic message we may find in the female Socialist realistic portraits? The body is just
the ideological fetish, an impressive source of energy, and a perfect frame for the communist builder. Such an
ideological image, obviously, creates the similar degree of sensual and simply physiological devaluation. And, in
this sense, again, as on the icons, it as if doesn’t not really exists.
As we could notice, the main principle of devaluation is quite the same. And here we should talk if not
about the direct borrowing, than, at least, about obvious interrelationships between the Orthodox Philosophy and
The Ideology of Socialist Realism regarding the denial of the nature of feminine In Russian cultural tradition.
So, then, which period of Russian history and culture we can search for a trace of the erotic notion? As
I mentioned, a lot of contemporary researches suppose it to be the beginning of 20th century, the silver age of
Russian prose and poetry, the silver period of Russian sensual thought. No doubts, it was the time of literary
and, which is even more unexpected, personal intimate experiments in Russian cultural life. At the certain point,
we can call it the time of sensual rebellion of femininity (the famous love triangles: Brusov – Petrovskaya –
Beliy, Mayakovsky – Lily Brick – Osip Brick, Merezhkovsky – Gippius – Philisofov: and of course, the poetic
and amorous adventures of Marina Tsvetaeva etc).
Although, we, of course, need not to forget, that this time (the first two decades of 20th century) was
also the period of the ultimate revival of the erotic in Western European Culture; the time of major
psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud and Yung based on the theory of gender, and the co- influence here is quite
obvious. (Especially, if to think of a widely travelled and very well educated Russian artists and intelligentsia of
10-s 20-s).
And even so, we, nevertheless, still need to admit that even at this period of the proclaimed sensual
freedom the erotic in Russia had no independent value on its own; it was never the idea of sensual research in a
76 Marina Novikova

name of pure profound erotism. On the contrary, the most outrageous erotic experiments in Russian culture, by
no means, were made in a name of creative purposes only. First of all, the erotic initially served the creative, and
was strictly dominated by it in Russian cultural space. And, as a matter of a fact, the erotic found the perfectly
inspiring sublimation in Russian art of Silver age.
Finally, I would like to compare three paintings of Anna Akhnatova, so called the poetic Femme fatale
of Russian cultural universe.
Famous Italian painter, Amedeo Modigliani, made two of them during winter 1911 being in love with
Akhmatova. First, what strikes us on these two drawings is the complete uniqueness of female body expression,
that purely the erotic for the erotic, which instantly provokes a viewer to rediscover his own erotic identity. And
through this uniquness of body expression it opens the uniqueness of woman, of a female creature of strong and
unique individuality.

By the contrast, the third portrait is made by the acclaimed Russian painter Yuri Annenkov in 1921.
What we can find and deeply feel here is the uniqueness of the spiritual expression of her face; there are no
doubts that this is a woman – poet, with a dramatic and unusual fate. And already through the uniqueness of that
spiritual expression we can identify the uniqueness of her artistic personality, personality, but not femininity
itself.
 Erotic Concepts of “feminine” in Russian Cultural Tradition: between Orthodoxy and Socialism 77

In conclusion, I would like to say that I find this difference in a female representation to be very typical,
even symbolic for Russian cultural tradition, where the initial model of the spiritual evaluate of the feminine still
goes first. I also would like to add that, at certain points, the contemporary situation in Russian culture regarding
the issue of the perception of the erotic does not seem to be meaningfully different comparatively to the whole
previous History of Russian culture. Of course, in a surface, inside the mass – media and social imaging the idea
of erotic on Russian ground finally became widely explored and advertised. But if to assume that the erotic is,
the first all, the internal, profoundly sensual, not the external, demonstrative quality of a human being self –
identification, than I suppose the idea of de-erotization in Russia society is rather strong, and it may take some
time to find the erotic really rooted on Russian ground. This is, actually, the subject of my current research.
 Carnal (Un)knowing: the Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period film

Olivia Macassey

The past is another country; they do things erotically there. In the last two or three decades there have
been a significant number of romantic mainstream films set in our colonial pasts. Examples include the
French/Australian/New Zealand co production The Piano (Jane Campion 1993); the UK/US adaptation of
Forster’s novel A Passage To India (David Lean, 1984); Merchant Ivory’s Heat And Dust (James Merchant,
1983); and American dramas such as Far and Away (Ron Howard, 1992) and even Gangs Of New York (Martin
Scorsese, 2003). These films have a key erotic component in their subject matter, which seems to be at odds with
the setting. As texts, they are informed by contemporary, post-colonial conditions of production. We are not
unaware of the violent, traumatic events, deaths, ideologies, and processes which characterised these settings.
However, there is little awareness of the “reality” of the past in the main narrative and mise-en-scenic aspects of
Period films. In these films the basic material and political circumstances which secure the stories absent
themselves behind a potted palm or rustling skirt, silenced in favour of a kiss. Ethnicity does appear in the
peripheral or secondary character; indigeneity tends to form as local colour: seething masses rioting obscurely in
the street, half naked people making obscene jokes from trees - or Sir Alec Guinness in brownface. Why, then, is
this the setting?
A common explanation for why history is romanticised so often in the Period film has been that the
setting – so often restrictive and sartorially elaborate - facilitates the filmic expression of sexual desire. Sex is the
Lacanian Real, related to the organism; or, sex happens in the body. Intense physical feelings such as sexual
sensations are felt at the level of muscle, of nerve, and it is impossible to adequately contain them in words or
figurative depictions. At the same time, once we have language it is impossible to exist entirely outside it, and in
this way the instinctual body becomes lost to us. The erotic is a structure with this impossibility at its centre.
Cultural studies theorist Stella Bruzzi, writing on desire and the costume film, addresses the popular
criticism of historical romance films as “trivialising history in favour of desire” by detailing the way in which
costume creates what she calls a “clothes language” which enunciates that desire. That desire here is often
feminine means that it is, for Bruzzi, a recuperative discourse which excavates the sexual history of women in a
kind of restorative process. 1 In her analysis, repression provides the condition for contemporary sexualisation of
the body because it simultaneously acts to cover and reveal the possibility of lack, whilst providing a tailor-made
substitute, in the way the fetish of psychoanalysis does. 2 Bruzzi’s argument is fertile ground for further
speculation. I will argue that the setting appeals not merely in its enhancement of the power of the erotic through
its access to fetish; but rather in its link to the traumatic through an employment of the structural erotic, a
configuration with a marked similarity to that of trauma. This allows the ghosts of imperialism past to manifest
without direct reference, as, indeed, they have to do.
Contemporary ideas about historical erotics make the past a good structural match for the expression of
current concerns. Among the recurrent themes of period romance are an unstraightforward relationship with
carnal knowledge, the distance between flesh and layers of restrictive clothing, sexual and emotional repression,
and a sense of the individual as being just as bound by social convention as by the corset. Unknowingness and
inability to speak about sex effectively dispenses with the pornographic (equally ‘unspeakable’), authorising
instead another rhetoric: that of substitution. The characters’ eroticism is imbricated within sartorial, societal
(and film) form, which precisely frames it within a rigid context and language.
In a coffee table book on The Age Of Innocence, filmmakers Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese quote one
Mrs H.R Haweis, who claims in The Art of Beauty, 1887 that

“Dress bears the same relation to the body as speech does to the brain; and therefore dress may
be called the speech of the body.” 3

This is an idea that is familiar to costume makers. And Stella Bruzzi explores it in her analysis of
costume in The Age Of Innocence and The Piano:

“Through their use of historical costumes [the films] create a transgressive, erotic discourse
which exists both despite and because of the ostensible moral restrictiveness of the times in
which they are set.” 4

Rather than repressing or camouflaging sex, Bruzzi suggests, “the oppressive Victorian clothes become
the very agents through which desire is made possible.” 5 So, it is the costumes themselves which actively create
a discourse by indexing a contemporary idea; that the Victorian era was repressive. The act of covering signposts
what is covered. Her example is that Newland’s restrictive clothes in The Age Of Innocence suggest both his
80 Carnal (Un)knowing:
the Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period film

repression and conformity; but also paradoxically his capacity for passion – that something is there to be
repressed. 6 This is a common deployment of period clothing in cinema. For instance the metaphorical stiff neck
of the desirable Edward Ferrars in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) is literalized by his swathe
of neck-cloth and collar, while the English in A Passage To India wear uniforms which intensify the heat, or a
variety of semi transparent veils, scarves, and overdresses. The Piano’s Stewart even wears a suit which was
deliberately made several sizes too small for the actor, in order to emphasise his discomfort. The idea that the
clothes spoke voluminous volumes about, and to, their absent, historic wearers, is conflated with the presence of
their speech to us.
Director Jane Campion has claimed that her Victorian character Mr Stewart probably never had sex at
all. 7 “The great advantage,” she says in an interview, “in setting the story in the 1850s lies in the possibility of
developing characters who approach love, sex, and eroticism naively, whose first experiences one can observe -
there are no more such occasions for us today.” 8 In a further interview Campion describes the advantages to
seeing “how people, without any education of the nature of romance and attraction, react to the raw situation.” 9
In itself naïve, this approach highlights the allure of the past as a site of a specific and different sexual context.
But, foreclosing on the possibility of direct expression has the effect of naturalising other representational
strategies. George Baines, The Piano’s alternative to Stewart, has been admiringly called an “impossible
character” bearing “the discursive eloquence of a courtly lover and the sexual openness of a late twentieth
century man.” 10 I’m not sure what this says about men of the late twentieth century, but the greater part of this
sexual openness is constituted not by dialogue or narrative but by camerawork – close ups of George’s pensive,
loving face, George walking around naked in mid-shot, George engaged in performing cunnilingus beneath a
crinoline, and so on. He consolidates his erotic status by means of the tension between this visibility and the
film’s intrinsic assumptions about invisibility and Victorian sexual practices.
The colonial setting makes available to the erotic a second language of substitution and erasure: that
which follows from the logic of empire. For example, in The Piano there is a conscious creation of a
nature/culture binary in which the romantic is posited as the taking up of the former by the latter. It is neither the
piano nor the beach but rather the juxtaposition of the one upon the other which strikes a romantic chord. For
the filmmakers, the “cultivated” and “civilized” behaviour of the protagonists contrasts with romantic moments
and sexual drives. The Maori highlight the puritan side of the colonists, according to Jane Campion, and have a
stronger, more harmonious relationship with nature. In practice, the Maori characters, none of whom is ever
developed or even alone in a shot, are the film’s only outlet for explicitly sexual jokes, and even their children
play at mating with trees.
A similar tension between English civilization and its dark sexual other is evident in A Passage To
India. Just as the contemporary notion of past erotics says more about the present than it does about the past,
deviations from adapted texts are telling glimpses of the way in which film form contributes to film content.
Lean replaces a scene in Forster’s novel involving a hyena and a car accident, with a curious sequence in which
the female protagonist Adela encounters some Hindu statues of figures engaged in sexual acts. Adela’s passage
into the erotic statuary is carefully orchestrated as a penetration with mid-shots of her looking and moving
forward, intercut with long-shots of the path, gateway, and overhanging canopy of greenery into which she
moves. This links it with her later entry into the cave in which she will later claim to have been raped by an
Indian man. India here provides the metaphor for animal passion. Three shots of the copulating statues (in full
shot) are intercut with increasingly near close ups of Adela’s face as she gazes at them. The camera actually
begins to wave slightly from side to side as if with excitement at two amorous stone figures framed by jungle.
Zooming ever closer to Adela’s face, we see her nostrils flare and an animal grunting invades the soundtrack.
Cut to monkeys on the roof of the temple. Then, three more shots, this time of gibbering monkeys, are again
intercut with Adela’s watching face (this time alarmed), before the sequence becomes a chase. Monkeys
scramble down over the naked, vine covered bodies and leap over others prostrate in the long grass as Adela
rides furiously away on her bicycle. The narrative function of the original scene, that it provides a motivation for
her engagement to the colonist Ronny, remains the same; and the scenes which follow establish this. In the
second of them, Ronny and Adela dance at the Club as a “notice of intent” to their social circle, which it catches
with background nods and raised eyebrows. Finally, the statues are briefly reprised (this time in mid close up), as
Adela tosses and turns in bed. As in The Piano, A Passage To India avails itself of raw animal and jungle
sexuality as both a disruptive, threatening opposition to the ordered world of the main characters and as a foil for
the heroine’s own desire.
Despite a lack of focus on the wider picture, there are still ideological projects at work in these films,
which work at reconfiguring the past as a means of affirming aspects of the present. To some extent the genre
lends itself to this, once again because of substitution. The personal works as a set of metaphors for the nation
and thus performs ideological work without the overt confrontation with politics and death entailed in, say, a
documentary or a battle epic. Lynda Dyson, in an article entitled ‘The Return of the Repressed’, sees The Piano
 Olivia Macassey 81

as a vehicle for the articulation of identity for those Pakeha New Zealanders descended from European settlers.
The narrative involves Ada the heroine’s rejection of white imperialist figure Stewart in favour of an earthier and
naturalized one, George, which can be read as a metaphoric rejection of the mother country in favour of taking
up a place in the new one. 11 In this way the past becomes a fetish object which guarantees the white postcolonial
subject position.
These re-visions are inadequate: there remains at their core a stubborn trace of other possibilities. The
trappings of the European in New Zealand, including the piano itself, are consistently carried about on the backs
of Maori porters; while the benevolent and spiritual Brahmin Professor in A Passage To India is, beneath the
paint, played by an eminent white British actor. In light of this imperial facet, let us take Stella Bruzzi’s idea
further. Bruzzi identifies “clothes language” as the mechanism of the Freudian fetish. 12 A fetish covers a lack.
The petticoat, on the other hand, covers a physical body. That this body is constituted by a lack of its own is the
given in Bruzzi’s analysis. However, to situate lack in the unclothed body of the romantic lover is to take sexual
difference as originary, which it isn’t. Sexual difference itself covers originary lack. In any case, at the heart of
the erotic is not sexual difference but the experience of sexuality itself. So there must be something more than
sexual difference or the mark of the phallus (which is the fetish), at stake. If we take not lack but rather the
inassimilable presence of the sexual Real to be the structuring feature “behind” the display, we find a
substitution which bears a closer resemblance to the return of the un-representable Real which characterizes
trauma.
Cathy Caruth finds in trauma, a “history that is not straightforwardly based on the referential.” Instead,
it is marked by disjunction, rupture, repetition and something which is never adequately symbolized at all. The
Period film contains such a history. Looking at Freud, Caruth explains that trauma is not defined by an event
involved, nor by a distortion of an event which gives it significance. Trauma is structural. 13 This structure is
typified by a combination of experience, a period of latency and then a repetitive resurfacing of some mark of
the event. So, it is expressed in the way in which the unassimilated event returns to the subject in the form of a
symptom. Caruth describes trauma as a shock which works “very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break
in the mind’s experience of time.” 14 The motivating factor in this break or delay is the subject’s inability to
comprehend the traumatic experience at the time in which it occurs, necessarily resulting in an inability to
assimilate it after the fact. 15 The colonial past is similarly inaccessible to contemporary audiences, yet returns as
a trace or reference inscribed in films which ostensibly take romance, not trauma, as subject matter. The erotic
and the traumatic share similar representative problems and, correspondingly, filmmaking strategies. Both are
contingent on temporal and physical distance between fact and representation; both are bodily, and use the same
rhetoric of substitution.
For Paul Verhaeghe, the traumatic symptom, such as the fantasy or psychosomatic problem, is the result
of each subject trying to exteriorize or project an internal conflict. According to Verhaeghe, the Lacanian reading
is that “[it] is a defensive attempt to give meaning to a part of the Real that resists to the Symbolic.” 16 This part
of the Real comes from the drive, and thus can’t be represented in the Symbolic but is eternally elaborated in the
Imaginary as, for example, the sexual relationship. 17 Fantasies of seduction and romance thus appear as cryptic
effects of the drive, in much the same way as the event returns again and again for sufferers of post-traumatic
shock. What Verhaeghe concludes is that “human sexuality contains potentially the same effect for the subject as
an external trauma,” even when there is no external trauma. 18 The implication of this is that fundamentally the
erotic always already bears the structure of trauma.
As trauma is bodily, personal history of the body informs the traumatic doubly as witness and as
displacement. Cathy Caruth uses the example of the “voice speaking through the wound” as the intersection
between knowing and not knowing in Freud’s own example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tancred, having
killed his girlfriend once, then manages to stab a tree which cries out through the wound that it contains her
spirit. Caruth’s point in repeating this, is that this voice is that which knows more than he himself knows. 19 In
just this way, can the Real body act as a repository of knowledge or archive of the traumatic event.
Furthermore, the displacement of speech in erotic and traumatic structures is analogous to that
engendered by the relationship between film text body and embodied subject: between our bodies, and those of
Adela and George. Firstly, because of the rhetoric of substitution and oblique reference which prevails in these
films, the film’s audience is positioned as anxious interpreters of signal and sign. A close up of Stewart’s teacup
in The Piano indicates his repressed recourse to Victorian sentiment as well as to china. Thus, the film form acts
to interpolate the viewer into a social relationship by virtue of the viewer’s embodiment. It is through the social
that the audience apprehends a history, and perhaps thus an origin, that is larger and older than us.
Secondly, the body’s capacity to feel these things is a constitutive feature of the film’s symbolic
meaning. For it is necessarily the history of the body which effects a phenomenological experience of the film –
what the body “knows,” it sees. And in this way the Real body acts as a repository of knowledge or archive of
the erotic event. The Piano has a well known moment where Stewart’s hand is licked by a dog while he watches
82 Carnal (Un)knowing:
the Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period film

George and Ada through the wall. The licking of the dog, enhanced by slurping noises in the soundtrack, adds
analogous sensory information to the cunnilingual scene. That is, the body as material referent acts to inform the
film text with a specific and reciprocal history of its own. Although not directly accessible to us unmediated, this
history too is touched on obliquely in those moments where film is at its most visceral or moving. That the body
can do this at all is a function of its position as the locus of vision.
In conclusion, if sex is the heart of the erotic, death is the heart of the traumatic; yet they have much in
common. Though exciting, the past has a traumatic component, particularly since it indirectly, and even directly,
involves the imperial project in the constitutive national histories of the film’s main audiences. This trauma, as
trauma, necessarily remains unassimilable. That it manifests not as death but as the erotic is less surprising than
it at first appears, given the access to the mechanisms of trauma which remain available through the erotic
structure. In this elaboration, the genre calls on our own bodies – not as testament to our unknowable origins and
deaths, but as informant and participant in the pleasure of erotics. Thus, it relocates the mark of our pasts in what
we know as an other country, a heart which is worn on the sleeve.

Notes

1
Stella Bruzzi, “Tempestuous Petticoats: Costume and Desire in The Piano,” in Piano Lessons: approaches to
The Piano, eds. Felicity Coombes & Suzanne Gemmell (Sydney: John Libbey, 1997), 97.
2
Stella Bruzzi, “Desire and the Costume Film,” in Undressing cinema: clothing and identity in the movies
(London – New York : Routledge, 1997).
3
cited in Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese, The age of innocence: a portrait of the film based on the novel by Edith
Wharton (New York : Newmarket Press, 1993), 29.
4
Bruzzi, “Desire and the Costume Film”, 37.
5
Ibid., 61.
6
Ibid., 53.
7
Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Jane Campion Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999),
128.
8
Ibid., 99.
9
Ibid., 118.
10
Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998), 213.
11
Lynda Dyson, “The Return of the Repressed: Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano,” in Piano
Lessons: approaches to The Piano, eds. Felicity Coombes & Suzanne Gemmell (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999).
12
Bruzzi, “Desire and the Costume Film”, 39-42.
13
Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: explorations in memory, ed. Cathy Caruth
(Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.
14
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history (Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins
University Press,1996), 61.
15
Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: explorations in memory, ed. Cathy Caruth
(Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 152.
16
Paul Verhaeghe, Beyond gender: from subject to drive (New York: Other Press, 2001), 53. Emphasis in
original.
17
Ibid., 57-58.
18
Ibid., 55.
19
Caruth, Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history, 3 (Freud’s own point is the compulsion of
repetition even at the expense of pleasure).
 Olivia Macassey 83

References
Bruzzi, Stella. “Desire and the Costume Film.” In Undressing cinema: clothing and identity in the movies.
London – New York : Routledge, 1997.
Bruzzi, Stella. “Tempestuous Petticoats: Costume and Desire in The Piano.” In Piano Lessons: approaches to
The Piano, edited by Felicity Coombes & Suzanne Gemmell. Sydney: John Libbey, 1997.
Cantin, Lucie. “The Trauma of Language.” In After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the
Unconscious, edited by Robert Hughes & Kareen Ror Malone. New York: State University of New York
Press, 2002.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma: explorations in memory, edited by Cathy
Caruth. Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Caruth, Cathy. “Recapturing the Past: Introduction.” In Trauma: explorations in memory, edited by Cathy
Caruth. Baltimore – London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Cocks, Jay & Scorsese, Martin. The age of innocence: a portrait of the film based on the novel by Edith
Wharton. New York: Newmarket Press, 1993.
Dyson, Lynda. “The Return of the Repressed: Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano.” In Piano
Lessons: approaches to The Piano, edited by Felicity Coombes & Suzanne Gemmell. Sydney: John
Libbey, 1999.
Gaines, Jane. “Costume and Narrative: how dress tells the woman’s story.” In Fabrications Costume and the
Female Body, edited by Jane Gaines. New York – London: Routledge, 1990.
Garrard, Mary D. “Artemisia.” (movie review) Art in America, October 1998.
Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1998.
Pihama, Leonie. “Ebony and ivory: constructions of Maori in The Piano.” In Jane Campion’s The Piano, edited
by Harriet Margolis. Cambridge – New York – Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Verhaeghe, Paul. “Trauma and hysteria within Freud and Lacan.” The Letter, Lacanian Perspectives on
Psychoanalysis 14 (1998): 87-105.
Verhaeghe, Paul. Beyond gender : from subject to drive. New York: Other Press, 2001.
Wexman, Virginia Wright (ed.) Jane Campion Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
 Notes on Contributors

Jennifer M. Collins is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. She received her Master’s degree in
Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, Plainfield, VT. A confirmed believer in the
transformative power of erotic writing, her fiction can be found in various erotica collections, including Best
Fetish Erotica, Best Bisexual Women’s Erotica, and Back To Basics: A femme-butch anthology.

Koen De Temmerman holds a Master degree in Classics and a postgraduate degree in Communication
Sciences. Since October 2002 he is Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium)
(F.W.O.-Vlaanderen) at the department of Classics at Ghent University, where he conducts a Ph.D.-research on
narratological and rhetorical construction of character in the ancient Greek novel. The submission of the Ph.D.-
dissertation is scheduled to be in 2006.

Andrew Feldmár, R. Psych., is a psychologist in the independent practice of psychotherapy. He has been
working in Vancouver, Canada, for the past 35 years. He trained in London, England, with the late Dr. R. D.
Laing, and remained in close association with him from 1974 until 1989. Feldmár has lectured and held
workshops in Canada, the United States of America, Russia, Serbia, Croatia, England, and Hungary. He is well
known in Hungary, where he published a controversial book and is the subject of a full-length documentary film.

Alphonso Lingis is a professor of philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published: Excesses:
Eros and Culture (1984), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), Phenomenological Explanations
(1986), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994),
Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995), The Imperative (1998),
Dangerous Emotions (1999), and Trust (2003).

Olivia Macassey is a doctoral student at the Department of Film Television and Media Studies, University of
Auckland, New Zealand. She is in the second year of writing her thesis (on the body, the erotic and trauma). Her
supervisors are Dr. Laurence Simmons and Dr. Eluned Summers Bremner.

Peggy Manouka is Director of Academic Advising, Lecturer of English Language and Literature University of
Indianapolis, Athens, Greece, and Ph.D. candidate on “Literature and Criticism” in the English Department of
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Lorraine Markotic holds an interdisciplinary position in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of
Calgary. She teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and English and in the programmes of Comparative
Literature and Film. She publishes in the areas of continental philosophy (especially Nietzsche), psychoanalysis
(Freud and Lacan), feminist theory and comparative literature.

Brendan Moran lectures at the University of Calgary.

John Augusten Nijjem is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department at Sydney University, Australia. He
writes on a variety of topics in philosophy, theology and the arts and has published work on the
topic of the erotic.

Marina Novikova is a Ph.D. student Modern Languages (Russian Division) at the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow. Her areas of interest are Soviet film studies, with particular attention to the notion of "Erotic" in Soviet
Culture and Women's studies.

Chris L. Smith studied architecture at Newcastle University, Australia and is presently a Lecturer of
Architecture in the Centre for Tectonic Cultures at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK. Chris has won
a number of awards for his scholarship. His doctoral studies centre upon the deployment of body constructs in
architectural theory and practice.

Katarzyna Wieckowska (PhD) teaches Cultural Studies and literature at Nicholas Copernicus University,
Toruń, Poland. She holds MA degrees in British Cultural Studies and Gender Studies and a doctoral degree in
British literature. Her research interests are contemporary British literature and literary and feminist theory. She
is co-editor with Anna Branach-Kallas of The Nation of the Other: Constructions of Nation in Contemporary
Cultural and Literary Discourses (2004) and author of numerous articles.
86

Przemyslaw Zywiczynski (PhD) teaches Theoretical Linguistics at Nicholas Copernicus University, Toruń,
Poland. He holds a MA degree in Cognitive Linguistics and a doctoral degree in Theoretical Linguistics. His
research interests include linguistic anthropology, linguistic axiology, and Oriental studies. He is the author of
Buddhism and Meaning (2004) and author of numerous articles.