Synopses & Reviews
Erotikon brings together leading contemporary intellectuals from a variety of fields for an expansive debate on the full meaning of
eros. Renowned scholars of philosophy, literature, classics, psychoanalysis, theology, and art history join poets and a novelist to offer fresh insights into a topic that is at once ancient and forever young. Restricted neither by historical period nor by genre, these contributions explore manifestations of
eros throughout Western culture, in subjects ranging from ancient philosophy and baroque architecture to modern literature and Hollywood cinema.
An idea charged with paradox, eros has always defied categorization, and yet it cannotand#8212;it will notand#8212;be ignored. Erotikon aims to raise the difficult question of what, if anything, unifies the erotic manifold. How is eros in a sculpture like eros in a poem? Does the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche still speak meaningfully to modern readers, and if so, why? Is Plato's eros the same as Freud's? Or Proust's? And what is the erotic dimension in Nietzsche's thought? While each essay takes on a specific issue, together they constitute a wide-ranging conversation in which these broader questions are at play. A compilation of the latest, best efforts to reckon with eros, Erotikon will appeal not just to scholars and educators, but also to artists and critics, to the curious and the disillusioned, to the prurient and the prudent.
About the Author
Shadi Bartsch is the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous books, including Ideology in Cold Blood, Actors in the Audience, and The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire, the last published by the University of Chicago Press. Thomas Bartscherer is a doctoral candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Table of Contents
Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer
What Silent Love Hath Writ: An Introduction to Erotikon
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Susan Mitchell
Erotikon
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Glenn W. Most
Six Remarks on Platonic Eros
David M. Halperin
Loveand#8217;s Irony: Six Remarks on Platonic Eros
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Shadi Bartsch
Eros and the Roman Philosopher
Catharine Edwards
Response to Shadi Bartsch
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David Tracy
The Divided Consciousness of Augustine on Eros
Valentina Izmirlieva
Augustine Divided: A Response to David Tracy
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James I. Porter
Love of Life: Lucretius to Freud
Richard Wollheim
Response to James I. Porter
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Ingrid D. Rowland
The Architecture of Love in Baroque Rome
Anthony Grafton
Architectures of Love and Strife
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Mark Strand
Selection of Poems Read at the Erotikon Symposium
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Robert B. Pippin
The Erotic Nietzsche: Philosophers without Philosophy
Eric L . Santner
Was will der Philosoph?
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Jonathan Lear
Give Dora a Break! A Tale of Eros and Emotional Disruption
Slavoj Zizek
The Swerve of the Real
Jonathan Lear
On the Wish to Burn My Work
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Martha C. Nussbaum
People as Fictions: Proust and the Ladder of Love
Peter Brooks
Proustand#8217;s Epistemophilia
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Philippe Roger
All Love Told: Barthes and the Novel
Eric Marty
Response to Philippe Roger
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Tom Gunning
The Desire and Pursuit of the Hole: Cinemaand#8217;s Obscure Object of Desire
Robert B. Pippin
Vertigo: A Response to Tom Gunning
A Gallery of Images from Vertigo
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Epilogue
J. M. Coetzee
Eros and Psyche
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Acknowledgments
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index