This paper aims to demonstrate the relation between eroticism, perceptually expanded experience (dilated, brought forth by the intelligence of the body), and the notion of interconnectivity and global consciousness. I discern two tendencies: the self's positional relation via technology proposed by philosophers like Descartes; and the self's non-positional relation via technology that seems to be proposed by some philosophers such as Fritjof Capra. I draw my sources from the second category: my work is enriched by an anthropological approach where (...) I expand my experience by integrating several typical dances from different countries, as well as traditional spiritual dances from a Western point of view. My process refers to oriental philosophy - it presents the exterior world and the interior world as two aspects of the same fabric, and questions the very notion of surface and bodily borders in which every thread of every energy and phenomenon, of every form of consciousness and its objects are woven into one continuous tapestry of infinite and mutually conditioned relations. This brings forth a redefinition of the notion of limit, time and reality. The bodily experience, enriched by training from several different cultures transports us to an experience of interiority which leads to states of expanded consciousness. (shrink)

Discussions of eroticism usually commence with references to Georges Bataille and his L’Erotisme, whose first English edition was published under the title Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, thus encouraging analyses in terms of transgression. This article opens with a quotation from Zygmunt Bauman’s essay, “On Postmodern Uses of Sex,” which reflects on the instability of the concept and emphasizes its contextualization. This openly declared incongruity raises questions of applicability. What is meant by (...) class='Hi'>eroticism today, i.e. in and after postmodernism? The article seeks to explore the relevance of the term in studies of urban drama and tries to suggest a workable approach that would differentiate between the commonly observable erotic material found on display within the premises of the city and the eroticism of the city itself. In the latter case the erotic relationship involves the materiality of the urban context and its user. The essay, focusing on drama, assumes that plays are written for the stage-their proper mode of existence-and deems it necessary to include the city/theatre and city/drama interdependence as well as the nexus of concepts such as urban drama and its genre restrictions into the following analysis. (shrink)

Richard III’s courtship of Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s King Richard III is a blend of courtly speech and sexual extravaganza. His sexual energy and power of seduction were invented by Shakespeare to enhance the theatrical effect of this figure and, at the same time, to present Richard as a tragic character. Richard’s eroticism in Act 1 Scene 2 makes him a complicated individual. Playing a seducer is one of the guises he uses to achieve his political aims on (...) the one hand, and, on the other, the pose of a sexually attractive lover enables him to put his masculinity to the test. Throughout the scene Richard is haunted by his deformity that, together with his villainy, makes him a stranger to the world and an enemy to his family and the court. In order to overcome his self-image of a disproportional cripple he manifests his sexuality towards Anne to boost his self-esteem and to confirm that the lady will accept him despite his obvious physical shortcomings. This article uses Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism and erotic desire to characterize Richard as a tragic individual and to explain the reasons behind his unexpected sexual behaviour in the seduction scene. (shrink)

Despite the increase in marine science curriculum in secondary schools, marine science is not generally required curricula and has been largely deemphasized or ignored in relation to earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics. I call for the integration and implementation of marine science more fully in secondary science education through authentic inquiry practices that foster the development of an erotic relationship with the ocean. Such a relationship can provide an opportunity to develop ocean literacy if that means people who engage (...) can actively participate in making more informed choices and advocate for affected parties and the ocean. I show how Simone de Beauvoir's erotic ethic influences the philosophy of the eroticism of the ocean, which is integral in the investigation and promotion of erotic generosities in science education, and using this theory to develop some educational implications for marine science within science education. Ultimately, I argue that the development and nurturing of an erotic ethic in the science education classroom is a valuable way to promote moral and ethical thinking such that students can afford nature, and more specifically in this article, the ocean, equivalent moral considerations in our community and science education. (shrink)

Dialogue, Philosophical Eroticism, Plato, Socrates, Power Dynamics, Episteme, Self-Knowledge, Eros.

This book focuses on feminist analyses of women’s oppression-perpetuating choices in order to ascertain how such biases in theorizing can undermine liberation.

This article is about Eroticism as a key-concept in the psychological understanding of the human mind. The meaning of the term can be defined as follows: Eroticism is the way humans experience sexuality as a self-sufficient mental activity. Sexuality underlies different social rules in varying cultural contexts and may lead to different ways of thinking, but there is no evidence that cultural diversity actually leads to fundamentally different ways of feeling. The constant disposition for recreational rather than procreational (...) sex makes eroticism a medium of human creativity. In this sense, eroticism is considered a central factor in the process of hominisation. The crucial cognitive competence which makes for the uniqueness of our species is due to the transformation of sexuality into eroticism and its disposition for social learning. In the animal kingdom, sex contributes to the welfare of the horde, while in human society eroticism contributes to individual self-recognition and paves the way to moral awareness. Methodologically, I plead for a cooperation of psychological and anthropological research, each utilizing and combining the complementary aspects of both approaches. (shrink)

The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and (...) eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros. (shrink)

Closely based on the dramatist’s personal experience, Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City offers a commentary on the life of the Protestant working class in the capital of Northern Ireland in the 1980s from a woman’s perspective. It shows the way eroticism is successfully used by the female characters as a source of emancipation as well as a means not only to secure their strong position in the private domain of the household, but also to challenge the (...) patriarchal structures that prevail in the Irish public sphere. The analysis of the play proposed in this essay focuses on the contrast between the presentation of its male and female characters. I will demonstrate that, while the former group desperately cling to the idea of preserving the social status quo, the latter display a more progressive outlook on the social and sexual politics of the country. In particular, I will investigate how the tensions between the representatives of the two sexes reveal themselves in the corporal sphere. I will argue that, as opposed to the erotically-inhibited and physically-inarticulate male characters, the female dramatis personae take advantage of being more connected to their bodies and use their physicality in an erotic fashion to subvert the rules of the patriarchal system and its strict moral code that limits their social roles to those of respectful mothers, obedient sisters or virtuous wives. (shrink)

I argue that Martha Nussbaum presents us with an invaluable stance toward nonmoral goods—especially those of fantasy—relative to 1) the anti-perfectionist view regarding moral goods taken in Susan Wolf's "Moral Saints" 2) theperfectionist stance taken by Iris Murdoch. I show how Nussbaum critiques Murdoch not by taking issue with her perfectionist agenda, but by suggesting an alternative to Murdoch's regret-less “coolness” in applying this agenda to the ubiquitously tragic situations that humans encounter.

I argue that Martha Nussbaum presents us with an invaluable stance toward nonmoral goods—especially those of fantasy—relative to 1) the anti-perfectionist view regarding moral goods taken in Susan Wolf's "Moral Saints" 2) the perfectionist stance taken by Iris Murdoch. I show how Nussbaum critiques Murdoch not by taking issue with her perfectionist agenda, but by suggesting an alternative to Murdoch's regret-less "coolness" in applying this agenda to the ubiquitously tragic situations that humans encounter.

L’érotisme très particulier de la pin-up, celui de la « fille d’à côté », fait de cette figure une icône américaine des années 40 dans l’imaginaire collectif. L’engouement populaire qu’elle suscite, dans ces années là, est réel, notamment aux États-Unis. Pourtant autour de cette simple image de légèreté et d’insouciance, de nombreux enjeux politiques se nouent. Employée de manière massive durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour « remonter le moral des troupes » sur le front et à l’arrière, la pin-up, (...) multipliant ses fonctions, devient bel et bien un instrument de stratégie militaire. (shrink)

A careful analysis of Harold Pinter’s screenplays, notably those written in the 1980s and early 1990s, renders an illustration of how the artist’s cinematic projects supplemented, and often heightened, the focus of his dramatic output, his resolute exploration of the workings of power, love and destruction at various levels of social interaction and bold revision of received values. It seems, however, that few of the scripts did so in such a subtle yet effective manner as Pinter’s intriguing fusion of the (...) erotic, violence and ethical concerns in the film The Comfort of Strangers, directed by Paul Schrader and based on Ian McEwan’s 1981 novel of the same name. The article centres upon Pinter’s creative adaptation of McEwan’s deeply allusive and disquieting text probing, amongst others, the intricacies and tensions of gender relations and sexual intimacy. It examines the screenplay-regarded by many critics as not merely an adaptation of the novel but another, very powerful work of art-addressing Pinter’s method as an adapter and highlighting the artist’s imaginative attempts at fostering a better appreciation of the connections between authoritarian impulses, love and justice. Similarly to a number of other Pinter filmscripts and plays of the 1980s and 1990s, the erotic and the lethal alarmingly intersect in this screenplay where the ostensibly innocent-an unmarried English couple on a holiday in Venice, who are manipulated, victimized and, ultimately, destroyed-are subtly depicted as partly complicit in their own fates. (shrink)

This article questions how contemplative contemporary cinema “sexualize” the landscapes. Through the filmography of four directors, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lars von Trier and B...

This paper presents the structural connections between eroticism and mysticism on the basis of two text sources: there are some texts of ‘The flowing light of the Godhead’ of Mechthild of Magdeburg and the Song of Songs 5: 2–8. Both texts represent a call for transgressions, since without these the experience of God is not possible. Eroticism as well as mysticism strives for the transcendental experience of union. This is however only to be attained in ecstasy, in a (...) state of the Ego out of itself where the border separating one from the other is transgressed. This results in an unexpected and incomparable experience where no more boundaries between ‘You and Me’ are perceivable. Therefore eroticism is a sort of sacred reality that leads to the experience of the transcendent and divine and through it to the existential transubstantiation of the person. (shrink)

‘Service’, particularly ‘domestic service’, operates as a specific articulation or intersection of processes of race, class, gender and age that reiterates images of the sexual desirability of some women racially marked by blackness or indigeneity in Latin America. The sexualisation of racially subordinated people has been linked to the exercise of power. This article focuses on an aspect of subordination related to the condition of being a servant, and the ‘domestication’ and ‘acculturation’ that domestic service implies in societies where black (...) and indigenous people are often linked to ‘backwardness’. Perceived racial otherness, class subordination, gender, age and domesticated servitude together reinforce an erotic image of sexual availability, particularly in younger women. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the human mind in its creativity and emotional self-awareness is the result of the evolutionary transition from sexuality to eroticism. Eroticism is arrived at and defined by the high amount of energy displayed in animal sexuality. We propose that the unique human emotional intelligence is due to this “overflow” of mating energy. What from the survival viewpoint looks like an enormous waste of time and energy reveals itself to be an unexpected psychological benefit. The (...) diversion of sexual energy from procreation — a process that results in erotic fantasies — turns intimacy into a source of human self -consciousness. This places different emphasis on the meaning of eroticism and provides a coherent scenario of mental development beyond mere cognitive capacities. Arguments are presented on how erotic imagination, or sexual excitation as an end in itself, promotes the human propensity for explorative curiosity; data from ethology, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience are presented to support these arguments. As philosophical anthropologists, we do not provide new empirical data, but the available results of comparative behavioral research confirm our hypothesis. (shrink)

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

Bazin's distinction between different kinds of realism discriminates between an authentic mode of apprehension and mere sight, or between revelation and spectacle, as it were, where spectacle, significantly, is connected with the arousal of physical sensation. My argument is that this resonates in unexpected ways with a ‘modernist’ conceptual paradigm, specifically in relation to the persistent prioritization of the temporal over the spatial as the superior aesthetic register, itself based upon a residual resistance to the visual realm. To pursue this, (...) I shall return to some of Bazin's most influential texts and concepts. In addition, a consideration of his more marginal discussions of cinema, sex and censorship will offer an oblique entry point into some of these broader issues at play in his work. (shrink)

Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Speaker: Professor of sociology at the Frankfurt School, West Germany., Lecture, September 11, 1984.

Le premier cycle de diffusion internationale du tango, dans les années immédiatement antérieures à la Grande Guerre, a eu Paris pour épicentre et les milieux aristocratiques et mondains de la capitale française comme lieu privilégié et premier d’inscription sociale. Un fort engouement pour la « nouvelle danse»s’ensuivit, ce qu’on appelle à l’époque « tangomanie»s’installa et, avec elle, sont nées des polémiques opposant partisans et adversaires d’une danse venue d’ailleurs et aux accents sexuels troubles. C’est ainsi en tout cas qu’elle est (...) perçue, au croisement de deux axes de réception principaux : érotisme et exotisme. Or ils sont étroitement liés. On en examinera les figures et leurs interactions dans la construction d’une image publique du tango promise à une réappropriation au-delà du seul contexte parisien et à une longue postérité qui se prolonge, à certains égards, jusqu’à aujourd’hui. (shrink)

The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This Zone edition includes in (...) a single volume a reconstruction, based on the versions published in Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation of The Accursed Share.In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility, respectively from an anthropological and an ethical perspective. He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to.useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a philosopher and novelist sui generis, died in 1962. (shrink)

The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does “sexuality” come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become cauth up are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as (...) intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality as we know it today is a creation of modernity, a terrain upon which the contradictory tendencies of modern social life play themselves out in full. Emancipation and oppression, opportunity and risk—these have become a part of a heady mix that irresistably ties our individual lives to global outcomes and the transformation of intimacy. We live today in a social order in which, for the first time in histroy, women are becoming equal to men—or at least have lodged a claim to such equality as their right. The author does not attempt to analyze the gender inequalities that persist in the economic or political domains, but instead concentrates on a more hisdden personal area in which women—ordinary women, in the course of their day-to-day lives, quite apart from any political agenda—have pioneered changes of greate, and generalizable, importance. These changes essentially concern an exploration of the potentialities of the “pure relationship,” a relaitonship that presumes sexual and emotional equality, and is explosive in its connotations for pre-existing relations of power. The author analyzes the emergence of what he calls plastic sexuality—sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction—in terms of the emotional emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as women’s claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentered sexuality, freed from both reproduction and subservience to a fixed object. It can be molded as a trait of personality, and thus become bound up with the reflexivity of the self. Premised on plastic sexuality, the pure relationship is not exclusively heterosexual; it is neutral in terms of sexual orientation. The author speculates that the transformaion of intimacy might be a subversive influence on modern institutions as a whole, for a social world in which the dominant ideal was to achieve intinsic rewards from the company of others might be vastly different from that which we know at the present. (shrink)

The figure of Eros is permeated with a logic of lack and fulfillment. As a figure of desire that seeks to be filled, that craves the ineffable, Eros is appropriately described by Plato as the child of poverty and abundance. It is a form of desire that seeks to take what lies outside, to possess the unpossessed and to devour what is desirable. Is it possible, however, to conceive of Eros—and eroticism—as something that is not working according to the (...) traditional logic of desire? Such seems to be the task of Georges Bataille’s philosophy. Refusing the vision of Eros as a quest for pleasure, he developed a thought of eroticism as sovereignty through evil. This article aims at exploring what this evil entails; what a transgression of moral norms, seriousness, and selfhood means. Bataille is famously considered to be a thinker fascinated by evil, and it seems that such a consideration is too easily a reason to avoid him. I would like to show that his thoughts concern freedom, sovereignty and community. Through erotic transgressions, Bataille saw the possibility for true human freedom and communication. Evil as liberation and not Eros as pleasure. I take on a new approach regarding Eros through an exploration of Bataille’s notions of continuity, morality, transgression, death and holiness. The first part of the article will set down the basis of Bataille’s thought. The second will deal in detail with transgression and death, and finally I will deal with holiness, thus making the final step on the path to sovereignty. (shrink)

This article contends that black feminist conceptions of ‘pussy power’ have prematurely foreclosed an examination of both pussy and its powers, thereby missing the erotic potential inherent in a ‘pussy power’ that is distinctly black – what I term black pussy power. Taking Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation performances in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) as my primary case studies, I use black pussy power as a conceptual framework through which to read Grier’s performances of black eroticism, which enable her (...) to resist racialised gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency otherwise denied to her. Moving away from delimited understandings of pussy as female genitalia or an objectified entity of female sexuality, I mobilise black queer feminist theorisations of the ‘arbitrary relation between black sex and gender’ to theorise the polymorphous potential of black pussy to signify beyond the narrow gender and sexual grammars currently available to us.1 At the same time, black pussy’s discursive connection to black feminine sexuality animates the insurgent potential of black pussy power to secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life. (shrink)

Georges Bataille considered The Accursed Share, his radical critique of economic theories based on rational categories of need, scarcity, and utility, his most important project. In Volume I, he announced two further volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, but he never published them in book form. This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction of completed versions of these texts as published in Bataille’s posthumous collected works. Here, Bataille expands on the notion developed in Volume I (...) of an economics based not on the management of scarce resources but on the exuberant consumption of excess production, the accursed share. In its first part, Bataille identifies eroticism as an ideal form of consumption, since in his view it is useless, purposeless. As this expenditure of excess energy demarcates the realm of human autonomy, the study of eroticism leads naturally to an examination of sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility. (shrink)