EROS
From
Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes 412-
Ann-Deborah Levy
“Eros is one of the divinities in the
Greek pantheon who features most prominently in literature.” Painters and poets
have developed his mythical figure. This figure has a strange duality: 1. The
image of the young god of love. Imposed over: 2. The ancient abstract force of
desire.
First
appeared in Hesiod’s
Theogony (7th century BC). He’s one of the three primordial entities
that existed before the formation of the universe: Chaos, Earth (Gaia) and Love
(Eros).
*He has the force of attraction necessary
for reproduction (at first without tender love.)
*First union and reproduction: Gaia and
her son Uranus Sky)-Uranus buried the children in their mother’s breast to
prevent generation. It shows that when abused the power of Eros is capable of
self-destruction.
*Orphic tradition: attributes creation to
Eros. Aristophanes parodies Orphic beliefs.
*Parmenides and Empedocles-Another story:
Zeus devours Eros and thus empowered creates the gods and the universe.
*
The breadth of Eros power extends to the
elements and nature because he’s a primordial god. Aristophanes: Eros’s power
is connected with outstanding beauty. Hesiod-the same.
*The association of beauty and power
reflects the irresistible attraction of desire.
*Originally he was worshipped as an
abstract power.
Eros and
Aphrodite
He saw her being born.
Also-portrayed as her son. (According to
Sappho Uranus was his father.)
5th century BC-Eros is the
patron deity of ephebic love (a youth in ancient Greece who had reached the age of
puberty). Personify abstract desire.
Aphrodite personified love realization and
its physical pleasure.
Greek erotic poetry: the abstract
influence exerted by Eros can be summed up as involving suffering. Sappho attributes to him cruelty.
Plato’s
Symposium-the dual aspects of Eros
Six speeches in honor of Eros. Can be
grouped into three. Phaedrus-the most ancient god.
Agathon-the youngest god.
Pausanias and Eryximachus: Eros as double-
(Aphrodite, his companion, too, is able to adopt two forms.)
He’s interested mainly in masculine love
and spiritual matters.
Eryximachus extends the concept of
doubleness to nature, art and science.
Aristophanes and Socrates: A “recounts the
story of how men were originally double but were cut in two as a punishment for
effrontery in challenging the gods and have ever since been desperately seeking
reunion with their missing halves. Eros represents the instinct that enables
men to rediscover happiness for an instant, along with their original
wholeness” (416).
Socrates bases his theory on Eros’s nature
on the teachings of Diotima, a priestess at Mantinea. Eros is a demon, a
go-between linking gods and men. Poverty is his mother and Expediency his
father. He procreates through heterosexual love and also creation of the soul
through homosexual love. Moves from beauty to the concept of beauty.
…Western literature. Psychoanalysis.
PSYCHE
p. 982 The first version of the love story
between Psyche and Cupid can be traced to Apuleius’s
The Golden Ass. It’s an allegory, a fable. Psyche means soul in Greek.
Based on oral popular stories.
The story is in my essay.
Michel
Foucault, The History of sexuality
vol. II
p.187 A problematic Relation
“The use of pleasure in the Relationship
with boys was a theme of anxiety for Greek thought-which is paradoxical in a
society that is believed to have ‘tolerated’ what we call ‘homosexuality.’”
Their boundaries were different. More
between men addicted to pleasure (the tyrant Eros) with boys and women and
those moderate, self-possessed, those who had morals. (Plato).
Can we say the Greeks were bisexual? They
had a dual practice but they didn’t recognize it as two different or competing
desires/pleasures.
“What made it possible to desire a man or
a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for
‘beautiful’ human beings, whatever their sex might be” (188).
Made a young boy and a young girl dance
and play lovers-the prize was for someone to have sex with a young boy.
To love boys was a free practice-permitted
by law and accepted by opinion. It had religious guarantees and basis in
literature.
Mixed with it there were other attitudes:
contempt for young men who were easy or too self-interested, a disqualification
of effeminate men and disallowance of shameful behaviors.
p.191 “it would be more worthwhile [than
the question of tolerance and homosexuality] to ask how and in what form the
pleasure enjoyed between men was problematic.”
We tend to think nowadays that practice
aimed for pleasure between two partners of the same sex [gender] are governed
by a particular structure of desire.
The Greeks thought differently. Appetite
was nobler if inclined toward the more beautiful and the more honorable.
Desire called for a particular mode of
behavior between two males. An ethical form. There’s the love directed at boys.
(Why) this practice gave rise to an extraordinary complex problematization.
There was special concern for this
relationships that implied an age difference, and status difference.
Passivity was always disliked.
In this type of relationships there was
much at stake.
Homer: one was stronger the other more
intelligent. (195.)
There was certain ritualization that gave
it form, value and interest. A reward
etc etc etc
Matrimonial life:
Open to a certain point.
In economics and household there was a
binary spatial structure: the exterior for the man, the interior for the woman.
Boy/man: common space.
The man could not exercise authority over
the boy as long as he wasn’t slave born.
Strategies to allow for the other’s
freedom, ability to refuse, and consent.
Timing. (p199)
This bond of love was doomed to disappear
and become friendship.
Matrimonial morality and the sexual ethics
of the married man did not depend of the existence of erotic relation in order
to constitute itself and its rules.
##
Sappho, Foucault; and Women’s Erotics
Hellen Green
“Feminist theorists have criticized
Foucault on two main points: 1) his omission of the historical construction of
sexuality as gender-specific and 2) his use of masculine forms of erotic
practice as his model for ancient sexuality in general. “
These forms are not transferable to feminine
behavior. His is a phallic mode of representation.
Teresa de
Lauretis: gender
blindness validates sexual oppression of women. To deny gender is to remain in
“ideology” that’s self-serving.
Foucault shows the boy’s situation as the
object of pleasure that can become a subject-could be understood as honorable.
The boy received knowledge.
It’s erotic domination-and it has
implications for women.
…
What’s the alternative?
Sappho expressed an alternative
representation of desire. There’s not enough information so we can’t draw
conclusions. However, she offers an alternative erotic practice and discourse,
with mutuality.
Marylyn Skinner analyses it p.4-5
Fragment 94 by Sappho-a vivid illustration
of Sappho’s poetry of mutuality, outside male assumptions. She doesn’t observe
the lover but makes her a part of her own interior world. Punctuation is an
instrument of poetic erotica. There is a dissolution between the self and the
other. The woman is also described as independent-outside the narrator’s love for
her.
p.11 Foucault fails to see the structures
of domination and the discourses that produce sexuality as gender reflects a
male-centered perspective. Isaac Balbus: Thus he implies that male has the
meaning of a generically human orientation.
His text denies female subjectivity.
Marilyn Skinner: It’s the missing half of
the Greco-Roman gender dialectic. Sappho’s poems circulated because they
offered something not only to females but to males as well. It was an
opportunity to enact a woman’s part. And yet, Foucault omitted her.
##
The Greatest Cryptographer of Contemporary
Myths
Talks about Love
Philippe Roger interviews Roland Barthes
(Here is something that explains the
cliché of reading Playboy for the articles-this one would have made me buy an
issue.)
Barthes sees himself as a semiologist,
critic and essayist.
Barthes wrote the book A Lover’s
Discourse—about love. It’s a personal book, but there’s a major reference
to Goethe’s Werther (1774).
Barthes: Love is out of date in the
intellectual milieu. The popular attitude too is expressed in denigrating the
lover as lunatic, a madman in jokes and remarks. Love as passion is almost
frowned upon. It’s considered an illness from which the lover should recover. (He
wants letters from the readers to prove himself wrong…)
In modern urban life there’s no place for the
poses of the pathetic lover. In the 19th century there were
paintings, lithographs and other forms to represent the lover. Now we cannot
recognize him on the street.
*The expression “The beloved object” is
one of principle: being in love is a unisex situation. In French “The Beloved
object” doesn’t take sides (fem/masc.)
*The beloved is never a subject. An object
indicates the depersonalization of the beloved. (unlike Sappho in the previous
text). The beloved is the unique object (psychoanalysis).
*One is never in love with anything but an
image. Love at first sight, ravishment, happens through an image. The ravishing
image is alive, in action.
*Barthes’s lover would say yes to true
love, but a “lifelong love” requires optimism. The expression has no meaning,
because the lover is within a temporal absolute and doesn’t parcel time.
*He assumes and accepts suffering and
unhappiness as a kind of value, but not in the Christian sense. It’s completely
blameless. One would cease being in love? The books come to a halt here.
*Common sense says that some time being in
love will split from loving. One puts aside being in love with its traps, illusions
tyrannies, scenes…Become less possessive, less dialectical and jealous.
*There’s little jealous in the book,
because there wasn’t anything original he felt he could say about it. Jealousy
is a phenomenon of anthropological breadths. Everyone knows it.
*He’s skeptical about the attempt of “unpossessive”
love. His young friends try it-he’s amazed at their shared sexuality,
sensuality, property, but it’s always only the first impression. There’s much
jealousy involved. An unjealous lover would be a saint.
*Loving several at once is delicious but
it’s spreading oneself thinly and it can’t last long. That’s the end of
flirting with others.
*The lover may struggle but will discover
he’s completely enthralled. He suffers from the enslavement of the other, tries
not to be tyrannical.
*Ideally-non-will-to-possess-borrowed from
oriental philosophies Let desire circulate freely-not to possess-to master desire
in order not to master the other.
*Successful eroticism is with the beloved
and it can be transcendent. Sexuality remains within the experience-eroticism
makes it stronger. It’s a sentimental value.
The film The Realm of the Senses is about
love.
*The lover is the contrary to a cruiser-he’s
imprisoned with the image. Some cruisers do it to find someone with whom to
fall in love. Don Juan is the model cruiser.
*The POV is of a lover who isn’t loved.
*The lover is silly because he is situated
in a dis-reality. His personal reality is his relation to the beloved. He’s
asocial, apolitical because he’s much less invested in anything other than
love. (Dionne Brand and Adrienne Rich disagree)
*The lover is a marginal being. There’s no
need to place him in society through works that put him there because they are
society.
*The lover is a natural semiologist-he
reads signs all the time.
#
#
Adrienne Rich
Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian
Experience, 1980.
Compulsory heterosexuality challenges the
lesbian existence. Feminists need to examine heterosexuality as a political
institution.
The world is hetero-centered and lesbians
are marginalized.
Violence against women within the home especially
grew while this political take strengthened.
There is a maintenance of inequality
through many strategies.
Like Dionne Brand-politics interfere in
love. They weigh on the lovers.
(Much more.)
The Double Flame/Octavio Paz
“The original primordial fire, sexuality,
raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in tur raises and feeds another
flame, tremulous and blue: the flame of love. Eroticism ad love: the double
flame of life” (p.x).
Poetry lets us touch the impalpable, hear
the silence (of insomnia)-Elizabeth Bishop’s silences.
Poetry is a bridge between seeing and
believing. Relationships between eroticism and poetry: eroticism is the
poetry of the body and poetry is the eroticism of the language.
Eroticism is sex in action while sexuality/pleasure
is a tool of procreation. Poetry too diverts from its natural end.
8 Love should be
distinguished from eroticism and sexuality.
Sex is the primordial source while
eroticism and love derive from sexual instinct. Proust -for Swann and Odette the erotic love is
detached from the sex act. Each of them feels it differently.
Sexuality is within the animate matter, shared
with animals and plants.
Eroticism is exclusively human (Anthropocene
studies would object here.) it’s an invention, imagination, a ma-made world.
Eroticism takes sex and places it in
society-without sex there won’t be no society-b/c of no procreation.
Sex also threatens society like the god
Pan. It’s creation and destruction.
Eroticism has a double face: fascination with life and death. Erotic metaphors
are ambiguous. 913)license and repression, sublimation and perversion, ascetic
and libertine.
Libertine communities are quite secretive.
14.
There are erotic religious practices. Tantric
sects of India and other groups in China, Mediterranean -collective ritual copulation.
Sin of Onan from the bible-perhas stopping in the middle.
Both emblematic and libertine eroticism reproduction is rejected. Both want
salvation (16), both are social-individuals confronting society.
Chastity both in west and east is a test
to strengthen us spiritually and allow us to leap from the human to super
human. There are other paths too.
Song of Solomon -collection of beautiful
poems about profane love. It’s also read
as a religious allegory. (Come on.) 19
Libertine splits between religion and
eroticism. Sade. 20. Libertinism is a expression of desire and imagination,
timeless. For them it is black light that speaks. 24.
Fertility is the luminous side of
eroticism, its radiant approval of life. 26.
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