Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern

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SHADI BARTSCH & THOMAS BARTSCHERER

"The twenty-eighth English rendering of the Odyssey can hardly be a literary event." This sentiment, which opens the introduction to one curious translation of Homer's Odyssey, could well apply to a new anthology on eros. From its earliest records, Western culture has been replete with the stories and images of eros, and there has been no shortage of teachings and treatises dedicated to the topic. Erotikon belongs to that long, illustrious, often scandalous tradition while simultaneously standing in its immense shadow. What role the book plays will ultimately depend on the roughly two dozen contributions that constitute it, but some preliminary remarks may help to clarify our intentions.

Erotikon draws together innovative and influential scholars and artists from many domains, including classics and art history, poetry and philosophy, theology and film. We have sought out thinkers with bold transdisciplinary agendas, writers who reach a large and diverse audience. Plato's Symposium is a conspicuous analogy and in some ways a precedent for our enterprise: gather a handful of contemporary luminaries, announce eros as the topic, and let the conversation begin. The colorful cast of that dialogue finds a distant echo in Erotikon's varied lineup. As in the Symposium, monologue predominates here, although each essay is followed by a direct response. And our contributors are no less contentious, no more unified in opinion, than those ancient symposiasts. The analogy is imperfect, of course, not least because the Symposium is the design and execution of a single mind. While Plato achieves polyvocality through compelling artifice, we have relied on impresario zeal. Still, the key similarity bears emphasis. In lavishing his most elaborate polyphony on the dialogue dedicated to eros, Plato suggests that this topic, more than any other, inspires and demands variety; likewise, Erotikon proceeds from the belief that to think deeply about eros requires that one pay heed to many voices and a plurality of expressive modes. Consequently, this collection not only cuts across disciplines and historical periods but also attends to manifestations of eros in a broad array of genres and media. Moreover, the contributions themselves vary widely in tone and genre, encompassing formal essays, less formal responses, lyric poetry, and an epilogue in fiction. The book's mode of exploration has been, in a word, polymorphous; our goal, what the poet Hopkins called "pied beauty."

Although the figures treated in Erotikon span two millennia, the contributors are contemporary writers, and so the more recent past forms the immediate background for these essays. A cursory overview of that historical background might well begin with the publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud's psychoanalysis, a melding of hard science and hermeneutics, became the dominant analytical paradigm for approaching eros throughout much of the twentieth century. His theory placed biological sexual instincts firmly at the root of erotic phenomena; other manifestations of eros came to be understood via a theory of sublimation. Through the work of French theorists in the second half of the century, most notably Jacques Lacan, Freud's influence was modified, amplified, and extended. With the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976, Michel Foucault began to transformthe agenda for thinking about eros, focusing attention on the historically contingent character of erotic phenomena and, more specifically, on the social and political powers at play in the constitution and comprehension of sexual experience. During the last three decades, the questions and methods articulated by Foucault have guided a great deal of the scholarly inquiry into erotic life undertaken in the humanities and social sciences.

These theoretical developments over the last hundred years are mirrored in the visual and literary art of the period. The work of surrealist painters and of filmmakers like Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock has deep affinities with psychoanalytic theory. Twentieth-century artists challenged restraints on their freedom to depict erotic content, and their work grew increasingly less inhibited. In literature, censorship trials marked the progress of liberation, from James Joyce's Ulysses through D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Visual art followed a similar trajectory, passing, say, from Pablo Picasso's 1907 canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon through Yves Klein's Anthropometries of 1960-61 to Robert Mapplethorpe's photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Toward the end of the century, attention shifted to the social construction of gender, and a self-reflexive, historicist mode, an archival fascination with the history of representations of sexuality, came to the fore in art, paralleling the theoretical work of Foucault and his successors. As with much in twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchampwas prescient, destabilizing gender categories with his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and reconstructing traditional motifs, pastiche-wise, with a mustached Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. His two greatest pieces, meanwhile, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and Being Given, incorporate between them a set of themes-voyeurism, narcissism, the machinery of desire, delay, profanation, exploitation, appropriation, difference, iconoclasm, irony-that reads like a program of the twentieth-century artistic engagement with eros.

Some hundred years after The Interpretation of Dreams and Les demoiselles d'Avignon and a quarter-century after The History of Sexuality, Erotikon aims to catalyze the debate on eros in the twenty-first century. Both psychoanalytic and historicist theses are at play in the contributions, but neither group is axiomatic for the volume and divergent views are also canvassed. Past writings on eros are explored not only as historical curiosities or potential influences on subsequent times, but also as manifestations of thought still worth grappling with today. This might well suggest that Erotikon's subject is perennial, the love that Shakespeare likens to the sun: "For as the sun is daily new and old/so is my love still telling what is told." Yet we also find much that is unexpected, even startling, in the following contributions. To cite just a few examples, these pages offer the outline of a steadfastly Christian theology suffused with the Augustinian understanding of love, which nevertheless proposes abolishing the notion of sin in favor of a revived conception of tragedy; a reading of Nietzsche that posits eros as the key to his diagnosis of nihilism; a cyber-savvy, modern-day Psyche, as curious as ever about her elusive Amor; a Freud who doesn't have a theory of eros; a Roland Barthes who defends old-fashioned novelistic pathos and celebrates caritas; and speculations on the sexual life of the Virgin Mary.

This sampling of views on eros maps out the contested ground of the concept. The general territory is familiar enough. At some basic level, there is the simple fact of the sexual nature that human beings share with much of the rest of the animate world. Superimposed on that is the richly varied terrain of human erotic experience shaped by culture and the overlapping but not coterminous realm of affectionate attachments. And at the outer reaches is a lingering desire for something more, something beyond the satisfactions of embodied mortal life. Differing accounts of eros often part company on the crucial question of the nature of that desire for more: Is it illusory? Even delusory? Or is it the manifestation of the human longing for the divine? Or an inarticulable blind spot in our nature? Or something else altogether? Unanimous responses to these and related questions are, no surprise, not to be found in Erotikon, but the differing voices contribute to a common conversation. Issues raised by one author recur in other essays; similar motifs surface in different contexts; sometimes goals or strategies are shared; often the points of reference coincide. Thus, while the essay-response pairs are straightforwardly in dialogue, a more subtle, underlying or overarching conversation is sustained across the volume. In the balance of this introduction, we adumbrate a few major themes of that broader discussion and sketch in some background.

AMBIVALENCE

One theme that emerges forcefully from Erotikon is a profound ambivalence toward the subject, an ambivalence that has deep roots in the Western tradition. Sappho, composing her poetry some time in the seventh century BC, expresses this succinctly when she calls eros "bittersweet." According to Greek myth, the ten-year Trojan war, the backdrop for so much of what has come down to us from antiquity, is triggered by the abduction of Helen by the love-stricken Paris. Similarly, the Romans attribute the origin of the Carthaginian wars to the curse spurned Dido casts on her departing lover, Aeneas. Violence is manifold in ancient Greek depictions of eros; and in tragedy, overweening desire can bring about the destruction of whole families. Sappho underscores the dangerous and destructive power of eros when she calls it lusimeles, an epithet that is used also of death and the Furies: "Eros, once again, the loosener of limbs, whirls me round."

Yet for all the destructiveness of eros, the ancients also recognized its sweet, even salutary side. Throughout her fragmented corpus, Sappho sings not only of love's pain but also of its splendor and beauty. And in classical Athens, the erotic relationship between an adolescent and his older lover readied the former for entry into civic life, thus acknowledging and facilitating the role of erotic desire in the life of the city. In Plato, meanwhile, eros attains supreme importance both pedagogically and philosophically. The Symposium and the Phaedrus depict eros as the catalyst in the edifying relationship between teacher and student and as the key category in the Socratic account of the desire to know. According to Plato's Socrates, the very impulse to philosophy is erotic.

The essays collected in Erotikon reflect, and reflect upon, this ambivalence. The title of David Tracy's contribution sets the tone: "The Divided Consciousness of Augustine on Eros." Tracy examines the contradictory manifestations of eros in Augustine's thought and shows how, for this key figure in the transmission of ancient thought to later times, the deceptive and destructive force of eros as cupiditas can only be overcome if it is transformed by the gift of divine agape to become Christian caritas. But Tracy goes on to cast doubt on the success of this optimistic synthesis, arguing that in later writings Augustine depicts a human will so distorted that it makes self-delusion in erotic experience inevitable: we are curvati in nos ipsos (curved in upon ourselves).

Many thinkers have, in fact, been skeptics when it comes to eros, as Martha Nussbaum indicates in her essay on Proust. Yet Nussbaum also reminds us of the other side of the coin by raising the question of whether a life that forgoes eros "would be impoverished, a life without radiance, a life possibly lacking in the strongest sources of social beneficence" (p. 226). Nussbaum places Proust's response to this dilemma within a tradition stretching back to Plato, in which the common theme is ascent. According to Nussbaum, writers in this tradition seek to retain the creative power of eros while purifying it of dangerous excess through a therapeutic ascent such as that described by Socrates in Plato's Symposium. For Proust in particular, redemption comes through the agency of art. Not only is the artist's heartache transfigured into joy through the making of art, but the work, as a selfless gift to the audience and as the medium through which separate minds can meet, also promises a triumph over narcissism. In words that Nussbaum quotes from Proust, "Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees" (p. 235). Yet ultimately Nussbaum argues that even this version of the ascent model reveals a fundamental narcissism at its core. To love "people as fictions" means to fail to open oneself to the full potential of human love.

While Tracy and Nussbaum evaluate strategies for the moderation and reformation of eros, Susan Mitchell's poetry-represented in this volume by the poem entitled "Erotikon"-makes what Mark Strand has called a "lavish and clear ... case for the wisdom of excess." In the subtitle, "a commentary on Amor and Psyche," Mitchell alludes to the ancient tale of how winged Eros becomes enamored of the mortal girl Psyche, takes her for his mate, but to conceal his identity only visits her under the cover of darkness. One night Psyche, overcome by curiosity, lights a lamp, but the instant of illumination provokes Eros to fly off in anger. Eventually the two are reunited and the child of their union is Voluptas (Pleasure). Mitchell runs riot with these motifs in a lyric voice fittingly called voluptuous. "I feel the need for something that does not exist," she writes near the start of the poem, and proceeds to sing a rollicking ballad of desire and fulfillment and ever more desire. Eros here looks not so much like a force that can be purified, redeemed, or even modified, but rather more like the very power that moves us, or the current of life.

One might well expect that in this context an essay on Roland Barthes-author of The Pleasure of the Text, theorist of literary jouissance-might also explore the wisdom of erotic excess. As Philippe Roger observes, "Over the course of two long decades, it is always at the service of Eros Pantocrator that [Barthes] portrays himself" (pp. 248-49). But on Roger's unorthodox reading, we see Barthes in his late writings arguing for a decidedly desexualized, sober, even nonerotic love as the supreme value in literature. The novelist-hero for Barthes is in the end neither narcissist nor voyeur, and his novel is to be "written under the double invocation of Pietas and Caritas, the accomplishment of rites owed the dead, and the 'transcendence of egotism'" (p. 254). Roger thus presents a Barthes who responds to the egotistical, even narcissistic, hazards of eros by positing a new understanding of the novelist's mission and by offering at the end of his life an "apology of caritas." (Juxtaposed with Tracy's essay, the Augustinian resonance here is striking.) Responding to Roger, Eric Marty goes so far as to say that for Barthes this new conception of love, embodied in the novel, represented the only way to move from the negating tendencies of modern critical theory toward "an ethical language and writing" (p. 260).

The persistent ambivalence toward eros, both in the tradition and in the present volume, is matched by a similarly sustained desire to settle the matter. One strategy for overcoming this ambivalence is simply to cleave eros in two, as Pausanius does in Plato's Symposium, thereby keeping the noble eros safely segregated from the base; keeping, in effect, "darkness on one side, light on the other. As if opposites really did exist," to borrow Mitchell's words (p. 16). This tendency is prominent in Augustine's laterworks, where the author comes near to embracing a "Manichaean radical dualism between the spirit of Light and the matter of Darkness," as Valentina Izmirlieva observes in her response to Tracy (p. 110). Tracy himself, meanwhile, argues that Augustine's earlier, more optimistic writings promise a resolution not in the form of an ultimate cleavage but rather through a synthesis made possible by "the pure gift of divine agape" (p. 91). In Ingrid Rowland's essay, we see how the heirs of Augustine in the Renaissance turned to pagan motifs, and to the erotic poetry of the Hebrew Bible, to depict a world in which "sex and piety could coexist in perfect contentment" (p. 147).

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